Discovery of yttrium

Yttrium has its origin in a quarry at Ytterby, a village near Stockholm in Sweden. In 1787 the army lieutenant and amateur chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius found there an unusually heavy black mineral, which he called ytterbite. In 1794 the Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin analysed it and found a new earth, yttria, which was later shown to contain several different elements. The metal itself was first prepared in 1828 by Friedrich Wohler. Four elements are named after the village: yttrium, ytterbium, terbium and erbium. Yttrium compounds produce the red colour in old television tubes, and are used in LEDs and lasers, such as the yttrium aluminium garnet laser, as well as in high-temperature superconductors.

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