Discovery of dysprosium

Dysprosium was discovered in 1886 by the French chemist Paul-Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who had already found gallium and samarium. Working with holmium oxide, a rare earth compound, he needed more than thirty attempts at dissolving and precipitating it before he could separate the new element. For this reason he gave it a name from the Greek dysprositos, meaning hard to get. The pure metal was not obtained until the 1950s, when ion-exchange methods were developed. Dysprosium is a silvery rare earth metal with strong magnetic properties, and it is used as an additive in neodymium magnets to maintain their strength at high temperatures, which makes it important in electric-vehicle motors and wind turbines. It is also used in nuclear reactor control rods and in data storage.

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