Discovery of uranium

Uranium was identified in 1789 by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth in Berlin, who found a new substance in pitchblende, a black mineral from the silver mines of Joachimsthal in Bohemia. He named it after Uranus, the planet discovered only eight years before. Klaproth believed he had isolated the metal, but what he had was an oxide, and the pure metal was prepared only in 1841 by Eugene-Melchior Peligot. For a long time uranium compounds were used chiefly to colour glass and ceramics. In 1896 Henri Becquerel found that uranium salts gave off penetrating radiation, which opened the study of radioactivity. In 1938 the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann detected nuclear fission in uranium, which led to nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.

Open on the timeline