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Throughout history, scientists have made great discoveries in laboratories, universities, and research institutions.
However, some of chemistry’s most important discoveries can be traced to a single rock quarry in a small Swedish village.
Over more than a century, scientists studying minerals from this one quarry identified a remarkable number of previously unknown elements. Without this one quarry, our knowledge of the Periodic Table would be incomplete.
Learn more about Ytterby, the village that helped fill the periodic table, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Elements are the building blocks of the universe, and in the grand scheme of things, there aren’t many of them. Currently, 118 elements have been identified, but only 92 can be found in nature.
Of those elements, only a few people and places have been honored with an element named after them.
Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Glenn Seaborg have all had elements named after them.
There are several places that have also had elements named after them.
Element 63, Europium, is named after Europe.
Element 32, Germanium, is named after Germany.
Element 84, Polonium, is named after Poland.
In some cases, one place might be nested under several different elements.
Element 95 is Americium, named after America. Element 98 is Californium, named after California. Element 97 is Berkelium, named after Berkeley, California, and 116 is Livermorium, which is named after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is associated with the University of California, Berkeley.
Many transuranic elements were discovered at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
So, if an element is named after something, it is usually a notable person or place, often a country or state, associated with the element.
With that, we now get to the subject of this episode: the village of Ytterby, Sweden.
Ytterby sits on a small island in the Stockholm archipelago, about 20 kilometers northeast of central Stockholm. It is a quiet community whose name roughly translates to “outer village.” Little about it today suggests its extraordinary place in scientific history.
Ytterby is part of the island of Resarö, which had 3,212 residents in 2020, according to Statistics Sweden.
No research institute or university is located in the village. No one of scientific note has ever come from the village.
Yet, alongside countries and continents, the tiny village of Ytterby has an element named after it: Element 70, Ytterbium.
That’s pretty impressive for a tiny village, except what I just said isn’t entirely true. Ytterby actually has two elements named after it: Ytterbium and element 39, Yttrium.
No other person or place has two elements named after it directly. The most astonishing thing is that I didn’t give you the full story because there is, in fact, a third element named after Ytterby: Element 68, Erbium.
Here I’d normally tell you why this tiny village has not one, not two, but three elements named after it, except that would be a lie, because I’ve been sandbagging you for the sake of dramatic effect.
A fourth element is named after the village: Element 65, Terbium.
Four elements, all awkward and hard to pronounce, all named after the same tiny village in Sweden.
So, what is the deal with Ytterby, and why in the world does it have four elements named after it?
The area around Ytterby has long been associated with fishing, farming, and stone mining. Like much of the Stockholm archipelago, its geology consists of ancient crystalline rocks shaped by geological processes and subsequently exposed by glaciers.
The rocks around Ytterby include pegmatites, coarse-grained igneous formations that develop when mineral-rich molten rock crystallizes. These formations can contain unusually high concentrations of elements that are uncommon in ordinary rocks.
For most of the village’s early history, interest in the area’s geology was entirely practical. Local stone served construction and industry. People extracted quartz in the seventeenth century for ironmaking, and by the late eighteenth century, quarrying operations supplied feldspar to porcelain manufacturers in Stockholm.
The scientific history of Ytterby began in 1787 with Carl Axel Arrhenius, a Swedish artillery officer. Arrhenius was interested in mineralogy, a rapidly developing branch of natural science at the time.
While investigating areas around Stockholm, he visited the quarry at Ytterby. Among the ordinary quartz and feldspar, he noticed an unusually dense, black mineral unlike the substances normally extracted from the quarry.
Arrhenius initially suspected it might contain tungsten, an element identified only in 1783. He collected samples and began showing them to acquaintances knowledgeable in chemistry and mineralogy.
His investigations convinced him that the rock represented an unfamiliar mineral. The mineral became known as ytterbite, named after the village where it was found.
What Arrhenius did not know is that his sample contained evidence of several previously unknown chemical elements.
At this point, scientists were just beginning to establish systematic methods for identifying substances, but their knowledge of the elements remained incomplete.
The first modern chemical list of elements, published by Antoine Lavoisier in 1789, contained just 33 substances, some of which were subsequently shown not to be elements at all.
The periodic table did not yet exist, and chemists had no clear idea how many elements nature might contain. Arrhenius’s black mineral would help answer that question.
The next major figure in the story was Johan Gadolin.
Gadolin was a professor of chemistry at the Royal Academy of Turku, in what is now Finland. At the time, Finland was part of the Kingdom of Sweden.
He was already a respected chemist when samples of the mysterious Ytterby mineral came into his possession.
Gadolin began analyzing the rock to determine its composition.
This was an extremely demanding process by modern standards. Chemists could not place a mineral inside a machine and obtain a list of the elements it contained. Instead, they had to dissolve samples in acids, separate precipitates, heat compounds, and carefully measure the resulting substances.
In 1794, Gadolin published the results of his investigation and concluded that approximately 38 percent of the mineral consisted of an oxide that did not correspond to any previously known substance.
At the time, chemists referred to certain metallic oxides as earths. Gadolin identified a new earth, which the Swedish chemist Anders Gustaf Ekeberg later named yttria.
The previously unknown element associated with yttria eventually became known as yttrium, after Ytterby. The mineral itself was renamed gadolinite in honor of Gadolin.
Gadolin had identified a previously unknown oxide, not isolated a sample of pure metallic yttrium. The separation of the actual metal would come later, following advances in chemical techniques.
Nevertheless, his 1794 publication is generally recognized as the discovery of yttrium and the beginning of the scientific investigation of the rare-earth elements.
The next major breakthrough came in 1843, almost fifty years after Gadolin’s initial discovery.
The Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander had been studying rare-earth compounds and suspected that substances previously thought to be pure might contain multiple elements.
Mosander had already made an important contribution to chemistry by identifying lanthanum in 1839.
He turned his attention to the yttria originally extracted from gadolinite obtained from the Ytterby quarry. Using repeated chemical separations, Mosander discovered that yttria could be divided into three different fractions.
One was the oxide of yttrium itself. The other two were new oxides, which he named erbia and terbia, both names constructed from the village name Ytterby.
In 1878, another chemist made an important discovery while studying the substances Mosander had originally separated. Swiss scientist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac, working at the University of Geneva, was examining erbium compounds.
Marignac suspected that erbium oxide was itself impure. He heated erbium nitrate and treated the resulting material with water, eventually separating it into two distinct fractions.
One fraction was associated with erbium. The other represented another previously unknown element. Marignac named this newly identified substance ytterbium, providing the fourth element named directly after Ytterby.
That is how four elements became named after a single Swedish village with otherwise nothing remarkable about it, but that is not the end of the story.
Additional elements were discovered through investigations of minerals collected at Ytterby.
These include scandium, holmium, thulium, gadolinium, and tantalum.
Although they were discovered at different times, together they show how the Ytterby minerals became the foundation for an entire century of chemical research.
In total, 9 elements, or about 1/10th of all the natural elements, were discovered based on what was found in the mine at Ytterby.
One of the most scientifically important discoveries connected to Ytterby occurred in 1879.
Swedish chemist Lars Fredrik Nilson was studying rare-earth minerals, including euxenite and gadolinite. During his investigations, he isolated an oxide belonging to a previously unknown element.
He named it scandium, after Scandinavia.
This discovery attracted attention because of something that had happened a decade earlier. In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev had published his periodic table, organizing the elements according to repeating chemical properties.
He realized that the table contained gaps representing elements that had not yet been discovered.
One of his predicted elements was called eka-boron. Mendeleev had estimated its atomic mass and several of its chemical properties.
Nilson’s scandium proved to be an excellent match.
The identification of scandium provided striking evidence that the periodic table was not simply an arrangement of the elements already known, but a scientific framework capable of predicting the properties of elements that had not yet been found.
In 1878, Swiss chemists Jacques-Louis Soret and Marc Delafontaine identified evidence of another new element using spectroscopy, known as holmium.
Holmium was named after Holmia, the Latin name for Stockholm.
Also discovered in 1879 was Thulium. It was named after Thule, an ancient geographical name associated with the far northern world, particularly Scandinavia.
In 1880, Marignac identified evidence of another rare-earth element in chemicals obtained during his investigations.
The element was named gadolinium after Johan Gadolin, whose investigation of the Ytterby mineral had started the entire sequence of discoveries.
Ytterby also contributed to the discovery of an element outside the rare-earth family.
In 1802, Swedish chemist Anders Gustaf Ekeberg identified tantalum through his study of minerals that included material originating from Ytterby.
Ekeberg named the element after Tantalus, a figure from Greek mythology condemned to suffer eternal thirst and hunger.
The name alluded to the difficulty of dissolving the element’s oxide in acid.
Tantalum is a transition metal rather than a rare-earth element. Today, its exceptional resistance to corrosion and its electrical properties make it valuable in electronics and specialized industrial applications.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Ytterby story is the extraordinary amount of time required to identify all the elements in its minerals.
Arrhenius collected his mysterious black stone in 1787.
More than a century later, chemists were still identifying new elements in the rare-earth mixtures that originated from the same investigations.
The main obstacle was the difficulty of separating substances with nearly identical chemical properties.
Despite its importance in chemistry, Ytterby remained primarily a commercial quarry throughout much of its operational history.
Its operators were not principally interested in extracting rare-earth elements. Instead, they continued supplying quartz and feldspar to industrial customers.
The rare-earth discoveries generated enormous scientific interest but relatively little direct income for the quarry.
The story of Ytterby is a remarkable example of how some of the greatest scientific discoveries can come from the most unlikely places. What began as an ordinary quarry supplying minerals for porcelain production ultimately helped reveal an entire family of chemical elements.
Today, the tiny Swedish village has a permanent place in scientific history, with four elements bearing its name and several others owing their discovery to its minerals. Few places on Earth have contributed so much to the periodic table, and it all began with a curious black rock.