History
William Hyde Wollaston noted the discovery of a new noble metal in July 1802 in his lab-book and named it palladium in August of the same year. Wollaston purified enough of the material and offered it, without naming the discoverer, in a small shop in Soho in April 1803. After harsh criticism that palladium is an alloy of platinum and mercury by Richard Chenevix, Wollaston anonymously offered a reward of 20 British pounds for 20 grains of synthetic palladium alloy. Chenevix received the Copley Medal in 1803 after he published his experiments on palladium. Wollaston published the discovery of rhodium in 1804 and mentions some of his work on palladium. He disclosed to be the discoverer of palladium in a publication in 1805.
It was named by Wollaston in 1802 after the asteroid Pallas, which had been discovered two years earlier. Wollaston found palladium in crude platinum ore from South America by dissolving the ore in aqua regia, neutralizing the solution with sodium hydroxide, and precipitating platinum as ammonium chloroplatinate with ammonium chloride. He added mercuric cyanide to form the compound palladium cyanide, which was heated to extract palladium metal.
Palladium chloride was at one time prescribed as a tuberculosis treatment at the rate of 0.065 g per day (approximately one milligram per kilogram of body weight). This treatment had many negative side-effects, and was later replaced by more effective drugs.
In the run up to 2000, the Russian supply of palladium to the global market was repeatedly delayed and disrupted because the export quota was not granted on time, for political reasons. The ensuing market panic drove the price to an all-time high of $1100 per troy ounce in January 2001. Around this time, the Ford Motor Company, fearing auto vehicle production disruption due to a possible palladium shortage, stockpiled large amounts of the metal purchased near the price high. When prices fell in early 2001, Ford lost nearly US$1 billion. World demand for palladium increased from 100 tons in 1990 to nearly 300 tons in 2000. The global production of palladium from mines was 222 tonnes in 2006 according to the United States Geological Survey. Most palladium is used for catalytic converters in the automobile industry.
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