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Another 'fun' thing to go through is the naming of the various elements, and some of the elements that were named, but turned out to be other elements already (

Another 'fun' thing to go through is the naming of the various elements, and some of the elements that were named, but turned out to be other elements already (Canadium, for example). Tom Scott has a great video on how Ytterby, Sweden managed to get four (!) elements named after it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lGe5jgZgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lGe5jgZgI More on the naming of the elements here: https://www.carolina.com/teacher-resources/Interactive/naming-the-elements/tr28303.tr https://www.carolina.com/teacher-resources/Interactive/namin... https://books.google.com/books?id=Ck9jBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=canandium+wiki&source=bl&ots=D0iomr5Qe0&sig=ACfU3U25eqT1F2eZg-XPNdukJmCnyGG68w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiskuyl_rHhAhVCbKwKHWPnC4MQ6AEwC3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=canandium%20wiki&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=Ck9jBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA223&lpg=...

jcranmer 8y ago
> how Ytterby, Sweden managed to get four (!) elements named after it Those four elements are yttrium, erbium, terbium, and ytterbium. The short answer as to how a small village could get so many elements named after it is that rare earth elements are so difficult to separate from each other. So the compound that was thought to be yttrium was actually a mixture of several of them. (Cerium provided the other group of rare earths--this eventually resulted in didymium, which was considered an element for a few decades until people realized it was actually a mixture of praseodymium and neodymium). Terbium and erbium were the second and third elements found from yttrium.