Discovery of germanium

Germanium was discovered in 1886 by the German chemist Clemens Winkler at the Freiberg Mining Academy, who found it while analysing a new silver mineral called argyrodite from a mine in Saxony. The analysis kept falling about seven percent short of the total, and he eventually showed that the missing portion was a new element. It matched in remarkable detail the element Dmitri Mendeleev had predicted fifteen years earlier as eka-silicon. Winkler named it after Germany, his homeland. Germanium became important in the twentieth century: the first transistor, built at Bell Laboratories in 1947, used it as the semiconductor material, although silicon later took over. It is now used in fibre-optic cables and infrared lenses.

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