In;;;;;;; ;;;;; ;;; ;;; ;;;;;; pasts. Two centuries ago, the sleepy village—now dotted with vacation homes belonging to wealthy resi- dents of nearby Stockholm—was a restless mining settlement, ship- ping out high-grade feldspar for the royal porcelain factories of Europe and quartz to line the blast fur- naces springing up across England. It is also the birthplace of some of nature’s most wondrous and least appreciated chemical elements.
He discovered an unusually heavy black rock among the
gray outcroppings and, being a man of healthy scienti;c
curiosity, sent a sample for analysis to Johan Gadolin, a
prominent chemist at the Royal Academy of Turku in
Finland. In ;;;; Gadolin concluded that the specimen
contained an entirely new element, later named yttrium.
By ;;;; chemists had isolated six additional elements
from the same rock, bringing the grand total in the newly
invented periodic table to ;;. ;ree of those elements—
ytterbium, erbium, and terbium—were simply given additional variants on the name of Ytterby, while the other
three were named holmium (for Stockholm), scandium,
and thulium (both from the Latin for Scandinavia), in the
nationalistic fashion then in favor. After a long, lucrative
run, the Ytterby quarry was closed in ;;;;. In many ways,
;e latter story began in ;;;;, when an amateur geolo-gist named Carl Arrhenius was visiting a mine in Ytterby.
Six valuable rare
earths, shown in
powdered oxide
form. Neodymium,
a key component
of electronic devices, is at front.
though, the town’s in;uence looms larger than ever. ;e
elements discovered there, known collectively as rare
earths, today form the backbone of the modern wired
and wireless world—even though you have probably never
heard of them.
;;; ;;;; ;;;; ;;;;;; ;;;; ;;;;; ;; ;;; ;;;;-;;;;;;;
mind: rare because it seemed at ;rst that they came only
from Scandinavia, and earths because they occurred in
an earthy oxide form from which it was exceptionally
hard to obtain the pure metal.
Today it is clear that the rare earths are hardly rare. ;e
most common of them, cerium, ranks ;;th in abundance
in the earth’s crust, one place ahead of homely copper.
Yttrium is twice as abundant as lead; all of the rare-earth
metals (with the exception of radioactive promethium)
are more common than silver. ;e “earths” part is also
misleading. ;ese elements are actually metals, and quite
marvelous ones at that. The warm glow of terbium is
essential to high-e;ciency compact-;uorescent bulbs.
Europium is widely exploited to make vivid displays for
laptop computers and smart phones. Rare earths also
pop up in more unexpected places like baseball bats,
European currency, and night-vision goggles.
With their growing popularity comes new value, and
even political notoriety. Terbium and europium recently
overtook silver in price, reaching ;;; an ounce. The
growing demand for rare earths has become the subject
of numerous government reports and a bill that passed in
the House of Representatives. ;e reason these elements
