Discovery of strontium

Strontium takes its name from Strontian, a village in the Scottish Highlands where a heavy mineral was noticed in the lead mines in the late 1780s. At first it was thought to be a form of barium carbonate, but in 1790 the chemist Adair Crawford and his colleague William Cruickshank concluded that it contained a different earth, and the Edinburgh physician Thomas Charles Hope confirmed this in 1791 by studying its properties, including the crimson colour it gives to a flame. The metal was isolated in 1808 by Humphry Davy through electrolysis. The red flame colour made strontium salts a standard ingredient in fireworks and signal flares. Strontium is also used in glass for old colour televisions. Its radioactive isotope strontium-90, formed in nuclear fission, is a hazardous component of fallout.

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