Three samples of beryl, from left to right morganite, aquamarine, and emerald
3 March 2023
Beryllium is a lightweight, gray metal that is strong and brittle. One of the lightest elements, it has an atomic number of four. Its symbol is Be. The name comes from beryl, a gemstone that contains the metal that has been known since antiquity. In Latin it is beryllus, which is borrowed from the Greek βήρυλλος. In Farsi and Arabic, it is ballur, بلور and كريستال, respectively. Beril appears in Anglo-Norman by the early twelfth century and then makes its way into Middle English by the end of the thirteenth.
Ancient sources are not precise in the usage of beryl, and in those writings the word can refer to a variety of similar stones. Today, beryl refers to a variety of minerals, all composed of beryllium aluminum silicate, including the gemstones aquamarine, emerald, heliodor, and morganite. And in medieval Latin, beryllus could also mean a crystal and even an eyeglass, hence the present-day German Brille for such a pair.
While the stone was well known, the metal we know as beryllium was not identified until 1798, when chemist Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin isolated beryllium oxide from the stone. He published his results in the Annales de Chimie, and the editors of that journal dubbed the oxide glucine on account of its sweet taste (as late as the twentieth century, it was a common practice for chemists to actually taste the materials they were working with and characterize them by that sense):
La propriété la plus caractéristique de cette terre, confirmée par les dernières expériences de notre collègue, étant de former des sels d’une saveur sucrée, nous proposons de l’appeler GLUCINE.
(The most characteristic property of this earth, confirmed by the latest experiments of our colleague, being to form salts of a sweet flavor, we propose to call it GLUCINE.)
Throughout the nineteenth century, glucine and glucina were the common names for beryllium oxide. In 1808, British chemist Humphry Davy proposed naming the element glucium:
Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium.
But four years later Davy proposed changing it to glucinum, an analogous change to what he did with aluminum:
8. Glucinum.
1. There is an earth which was discovered by Vauquelin in 1798, called glucine, or glucina. It may be obtained from the beryl or the emerald, by the following process […] There is great reason to believe that glucina is a compound of a peculiar metallic substance, which may be called glucinum, and oxygene.
But names based on beryl were also in use. Because other oxides, in particular yttrium oxide, were also sweet tasting, in 1802 Martin Klaproth proposed calling it Beryllina:
Um daher keine Verwechselung derselben mit der Yttererde zu veranlassen, würde es vielleicht gerathen seyn, jenen Namen Glykine aufzugeben, und durch Beryllerde (Beryllina) zu ersetzen.
(In order not to confuse it with yttria, it might be advisable to give up the name glycine and replace it with beryllia (Beryllina).)
Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius was the first to use the name beryllium, and “Beryllium (Glucinum)” with the symbol “Be” appears in a table of elements in an 1814 English translation of his Attempt to Establish a Pure Scientific System of Minerology.
Over time, the name beryllium won out over the sweeter alternatives.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. beril, n.
Berzelius, J. Jacob. Attempt to Establish a Pure Scientific System of Minerology. John Black, trans. London: Robert Baldwin, 118. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dana, James D. A System of Mineralogy, second edition. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1844, 550. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
Davy, Humphry. “Electro-Chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 98, 30 June 1808, 353. HathiTrust Digital Library.
———. Elements of Chemical Philosophy. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1812, 203. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. beryllus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Klaproth, Martin Heinrich. Beiträge zur Chemischen Kenntniss der Mineralkörper, vol. 3, 1802, 79. Google Books.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. beril, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. beryllium, n., glucinum, n., beryl, n.
Vauquelin, Louis-Nicolas. “Analyse: De l’Aigue Marine, ou Béril” (“Analysis: Aquamarine or Beryl”). Annales de Chimie, 26, 1798, 169n. Google Books.
Wöhler, Friedrich. “Ueber das Beryllium and Yttrium.” Annalen der Physik und Chemie, 13, 1828, 577. Google Books.
Photo credit: Chris Ralph, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.