Discovery of platinum

Platinum was known to the indigenous peoples of present-day Colombia and Ecuador long before Europeans arrived, but it first became known in Europe through the Italian scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger, who in 1557 wrote of a metal from Central America that no fire could melt. The Spanish called it platina, meaning little silver, and at first regarded it as an unwelcome impurity in the gold they mined in Colombia. In the eighteenth century scientists such as Antonio de Ulloa and Charles Wood studied it more closely and recognised it as a distinct metal. In the early nineteenth century William Hyde Wollaston developed a method of making it malleable. Platinum is rare, dense and resistant to corrosion, and it is used in jewellery, laboratory equipment and catalytic converters.

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