Cerium, Ce, element #58
12 May 2023
Cerium is a rare-earth element, a soft, ductile, silvery-white metal with atomic number 58 and symbol Ce. It has a variety of commercial uses, including in catalytic converters and in LED lights. It was independently discovered by two groups in 1803, in Sweden by Jöns Jakob Berzelius and Wilhelm Hisinger, and in Germany by Martin Heinrich Klaproth. Berzelius dubbed the metal cerium and Klaproth ochroit.
Berzelius named the element for the asteroid Ceres, which had recently been discovered, following the scheme of naming elements after planets, as in uranium, tellurium, and, later in the twentieth century, plutonium and neptunium. Hisinger and Berzelius justified their choice of name in an 1803 article in the Neues Allgemeines Journal der Chemie, which was translated into English the following year in the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts:
The tungstein of Bastnas, which we call cerite, for reasons which will be presently given, was found, in the year 1750, in a copper-mine called Bastnas, or Saint-Gorans Koppargrafva, at Riddare-Hyltan, in Westmannia, of which, with asbestos, it formed the matrix.
[…]
These appearances, and those which follow, determined us to consider the substance found in the cerite, as the oxide of a metal hitherto unknown, to which we have given the name Cerium, from the planet Ceres, discovered by Piazzi.
Sources:
D’Hesinger, W. and J.B. Bergelius. “Account of Cerium, a New Metal Found in a Mineral Substance from Bastnas, in Sweden.” Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, 9, December 1804, 290–300, at 290 and 294. Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Hisinger, W. and J. Berzelius. “Cerium ein Neues Metall au seiner Schwedischen Steinart, Bastnäs Tungstein Genannt.” Neues Allgemeines Journal der Chemie, 2, 1803, 397–418 at 397 and 403. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022 (online).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cerium, n.
Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 2009. Images-of-elements.com. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.