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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly surprising that it’s in Sweden, as many rare earth metals were first discovered here and are named after Swedish things:

- Scandium from Scandinavia

- Yttrium, Terbium, Erbium and Ytterbium from the village of Ytterby

- Holmium from Stockholm

- Thulium from Thule

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Quite impressive that little Sweden has found the second most elements in the world, 19 of them.

https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/legac...

The Nova program 'Race to Zero'(I think) has a great overview on Bohr and his contemporaries to induce liquid phase of the lowest elements.

Bohr was Danish though, so how is this related? Other than Sweden being a boat trip away?

Sweden has produced a great chemist or two for sure.

Sweden has been an industrial powerhouse for centuries, due to its rich deposits of various ores in its relatively young mountains, and excellent access to the rest of Europe by sea.

No wonder chemistry was in high regard there for quite some time.

Would Thorium be part of that list as well?

Edit: I kinda know that because I have some weird passion about the elements of periodic table and because I'm reading "Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of The Elements From Arsenic To Zinc" which I really recommend!

Indeed, good catch : > Thorium was discovered in 1828 by the Norwegian amateur mineralogist Morten Thrane Esmark and identified by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, who named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium

There’s also tungsten: “tung” is heavy, and “sten” stone in Swedish.

Which interestingly is called Volfram in Swedish.

Tungsten refers to the rock where the element is found. The english language reused the name for the actual element.

And in English we use both Tungsten and Wolfram. The former is more popular, but the latter is still the basis of the element's symbol.

I don't know anyone who refers to the element as wolfram in English. The abbreviations are internationally standardized and many don't stand for the English words anyway (Latin is quite common, e.g. Pb means plumbum, for lead).

I also don't know anyone who refers to it as wolfram, but wolfram is all over the tungsten wikipedia page.

The symbol is W, which stands for Wolfram. So everyone refers to it that way, at least initially.

That's gonna be people either in specialized areas, or non-native English speakers using their own words. I see British English spelling all over Wikipedia, for example, but I never see anyone in my actual life in the US use it except for one guy who is from, you can guess.

There's also Gadolinium after Johan Gadolin

But he was Finnish

But a Swedish speaking Finn and it seems he made his discoveries while living in Sweden.

From wikipedia:

"Johan Gadolin was born in Åbo (Finnish name Turku), Finland (then a part of Sweden)." [0]

"In 1779 Gadolin moved to Uppsala University."

Uppsala is in Sweden.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Gadolin

Also most of todays Finland was under Swedish rule until 1809.

Was any part of todays Finland not under Swedish rule 1809?

The area around Viborg was lost to the russians in 1721 and 1743. The western part of that, Lappeenranta and part of Kymenlaakso, are part of Finland today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Finland

> But a Swedish speaking Finn

this is the argument Russia has used to invade Ukraine...

That Finland has a sizable Swedish-speaking minority? The guy was considered Swedish back then; Finland was simply the Eastern half of the Swedish kingdom.

There's plenty of Finnish speaking Swedes too. Is that also an argument for invasion?

No, that speaking Swedish means you are not Finnish or, in any remote way, makes you "closer to being Swedish"

What's your opinion on Belgians and the Swiss?

that language != nationality?

Swedish is an official language in Finland nowadays. Back then, it was just a part of Sweden (Finland was not independent)

the point is that just because a Finnish person speaks Swedish as native language does NOT make them Swedish! or any less Finnnish

> Finland (then a part of Sweden)

If Gadolin is Finnish, then, by the same logic, Immanuel Kant is Russian, because his birthplace, Koenigsberg, is a Russian exclave now.

Gadolin was Finnish by the same logic Benjamin Franklin was American. Or would you consider him an Englishman? He was born in the British colony, after all.

Reminds me of Tesla. Was he Serb or Croatian

He was an American.

Right

Isn't Thule on Greenland (or are there multiple Thule around?)

There seems to be multiple Thule, but none of them in Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_(disambiguation), although there seems to be a Swedish brand with the name as well, but unrelated to the location as far as I can tell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Group

Thule comes from a Greek cartographer, Pytheas. Thule was supposed to be an island to the north of Britain, but nobody knows what he referred to or if whatever place he referred to even was real. Some people, especially 19th century Scandinavian nationalists, associate Thule with Scandinavia.

this is possibly in reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

Unlikely. Thule was supposed to exist in 330 BC, long after Doggerland had disappeared. There are many other candidates which would make more sense and fit better with his descriptions, including Norway.

Multiple I think. I believe Thule was the capital of the Greenland Norse civilization, but it's also a local story about a high culture that disappeared.

Aluminum (American pronunciation) not being 'from/ of the Earth', or 'of Scandinavia', it would appear.

Also, Tungsten.

Annoyingly, even though tungsten literally means "heavy stone" in Swedish, the name of the element in Swedish is "volfram".

Thus the chemical symbol W (Wolfram) for tungsten.

But "Wolfram" comes from German, as it was described in the 16th century already. The isolation of pure tungsten then was done by Spanish scientists.

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