History
Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table, predicted the existence of an element ekaboron, with an atomic mass between 40 and 48 in 1869. Lars Fredrik Nilson and his team detected this element in the minerals euxenite and gadolinite. Nilson prepared 2 grams of scandium oxide of high purity. He named the element scandium, from the Latin Scandia meaning "Scandinavia". Nilson was apparently unaware of Mendeleev's prediction, but Per Teodor Cleve recognized the correspondence and notified Mendeleev.
Metallic scandium was produced for the first time in 1937 by electrolysis of a eutectic mixture, at 700–800 °C, of potassium, lithium, and scandium chlorides. The first pound of 99% pure scandium metal was produced in 1960. The use for aluminium alloys began in 1971, following a US patent. Aluminium-scandium alloys were also developed in the USSR.
Laser crystals of gadolinium-scandium-gallium garnet (GSGG) were used in strategic defense applications developed in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Read more about this topic: Scandium Compounds
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)