Strontium - History

History

Strontium is named after the Scottish village of Strontian (Gaelic Sron an t-Sithein), having been discovered in the ores taken from the lead mines there. In 1790, Adair Crawford, a physician engaged in the preparation of barium, and his colleague William Cruickshank, recognised that the Strontian ores exhibited different properties to those normally seen with other "heavy spars" sources. This allowed Adair to conclude on page 355 "... it is probable indeed, that the scotch mineral is a new species of earth which has not hitherto been sufficiently examined." The physician and mineral collector Friedrich Gabriel Sulzer analysed together with Johann Friedrich Blumenbach the mineral from Strontian and named it strontianite. He also came to the conclusion that it was distinct from the witherite and contained a new earth (neue Grunderde). In 1793 Thomas Charles Hope, a professor of chemistry at the University of Glasgow proposed the name strontites. He confirmed the earlier work of Crawford and recounted: " ... Considering it a peculiar earth I thought it necessary to give it an name. I have called it Strontites, from the place it was found; a mode of derivation in my opinion, fully as proper as any quality it may possess, which is the present fashion." The element was eventually isolated by Sir Humphry Davy in 1808 by the electrolysis of a mixture containing strontium chloride and mercuric oxide, and announced by him in a lecture to the Royal Society on 30 June 1808. In keeping with the naming of the other alkaline earths, he changed the name to strontium.

The first large scale application of strontium was in the production of sugar from sugar beet. Although a crystallisation process using strontium hydroxide was patented by Augustin-Pierre Dubrunfaut in 1849 the large scale introduction came with the improvement of the process in the early 1870s. The German sugar industry used the process well into the 20th century. Prior to World War I the beet sugar industry used 100,000 to 150,000 tons of strontium hydroxide for this process per year. The strontium hydroxide was recycled in the process, but the demand to substitute losses during production was high enough to create a significant demand initiating mining of strontianite in the Münsterland. The mining of strontianite in Germany ended when mining of the celestite deposits in Gloucestershire started. These mines supplied most of the world strontium supply from 1884 to 1941. Although the celestite deposits in the Granada basin were known for some time the large scale mining did not start before the 1950s.