Day: March 14, 2018

There’s a small town in Sweden that has not one, not two, not three, but four elements named after it. Those elements–yttrium(Y), terbium (Tb), erbium (Er), and ytterbium (Yb)–were discovered by part-time chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius in the gadolinite, a black stone that’s also referred to as ytterbite, in Ytterby Mine on the Stockholm archipelago. From wikipedia:In addition, three other lanthanides, holmium (Ho, named after Stockholm), thulium (Tm, named after Thule, a mythic analog of Scandinavia), and gadolinium (Gd, after the…… Continue reading One Town, Four Elements – Tom Scott