Chemistry, crystallography and optics · 1766–1828
William Hyde Wollaston
Wollaston trained as a physician, left medicine for chemistry, and made his living from a process he kept secret for most of his life: a powder-metallurgy route that turned crude platinum into a malleable, workable metal. The commercial value of that process is what gave him a steady supply of platinum ore residues to analyze, and the new elements came out of that analysis. He also mapped dark lines in the solar spectrum, designed the reflecting goniometer that made crystal angles precisely measurable, and worked on the camera lucida.
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Contribution & context
Working on the part of crude platinum dissolved in aqua regia, he separated palladium in 1802 and rhodium in 1804. He announced palladium anonymously, by offering it for sale as a new metal, and only claimed it publicly after a chemist had attempted to prove it a platinum–mercury .
DOE — PlatinumLANL Periodic Table — PlatinumRSC Periodic Table — PalladiumDOE — PalladiumLANL Periodic Table — Palladium
Discoveries in context
Four metals found in a residue ↗
Dissolving crude platinum left an insoluble residue that most analysts discarded. Two who examined it instead found four new elements in it.
Sources & further reading
- DOE — Platinum ↗United States Department of EnergyReference explanation · Source checked
- LANL Periodic Table — Platinum ↗Los Alamos National LaboratoryReference explanation · Source checked
- RSC Periodic Table — Palladium ↗Royal Society of ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
- DOE — Palladium ↗United States Department of EnergyReference explanation · Source checked
- LANL Periodic Table — Palladium ↗Los Alamos National LaboratoryReference explanation · Source checked
Sources and further reading. What the review labels mean