List of Chemical Elements Naming Controversies - Element 23

Element 23

Vanadium (named after Vanadis, another name for Freyja, the Scandinavian goddess of fertility) was originally discovered by Andrés Manuel del Río (a Spanish-born Mexican mineralogist) in Mexico City in 1801. He discovered the element after being sent a sample of "brown lead" ore (plomo pardo de Zimapán, now named vanadinite). Through experimentation, he found it to form salts with a wide variety of colors, so he named the element panchromium (Greek: all colors). He later renamed this substance erythronium, since most of the salts turned red when heated. The French chemist Hippolyte Victor Collet-Descotils incorrectly declared that del Río's new element was only impure chromium. Del Río thought himself to be mistaken and accepted the statement of the French chemist that was also backed by del Río's friend Alexander von Humboldt.

In 1831, Sefström of Sweden rediscovered vanadium in a new oxide he found while working with some iron ores. He chose to call the element vanadium after the Old Norse Vanadís, another name for the Norse Vanr goddess Freyja, whose facets include connections to beauty and fertility, because of the many beautifully colored chemical compounds it produces. Later that same year Friedrich Wöhler confirmed del Río's earlier work. Later, George William Featherstonhaugh, one of the first US geologists, suggested that the element should be named "rionium" after del Río, but this never happened.