Analytical chemistry and agricultural chemistry · 1840–1899
Lars Fredrik Nilson
Nilson worked at Uppsala on the analysis of rare-earth minerals, then moved to agricultural chemistry, where he studied soil and fertilizer composition. His rare-earth work was of the exhausting fractional kind: processing kilograms of Scandinavian minerals to obtain grams of oxide, then checking whether the resulting material behaved as one substance.
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Contribution & context
In 1879 he obtained a new from euxenite and gadolinite and named the element scandium. He did not immediately connect it to Mendeleev’s predicted eka-boron; Per Teodor Cleve made that identification shortly afterwards, and the match became one of the three early confirmations of the periodic law.
RSC Periodic Table — ScandiumLANL Periodic Table — ScandiumRSC Periodic Table — ScandiumLANL Periodic Table — Scandium
Discoveries in context
Filling the gaps the table left open ↗
Mendeleev left blank places and stated what should occupy them; the elements that arrived turned an arrangement into a predictive instrument, and the last two gaps had to be manufactured.
Sources & further reading
- RSC Periodic Table — Scandium ↗Royal Society of ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
- LANL Periodic Table — Scandium ↗Los Alamos National LaboratoryReference explanation · Source checked
- RSC Periodic Table — Scandium ↗Royal Society of ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
- LANL Periodic Table — Scandium ↗Los Alamos National LaboratoryReference explanation · Source checked
Sources and further reading. What the review labels mean