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Kind: captions
Language: en

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In 1792, a chemist named Gadolin received
a sample of a mysterious black rock

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from this now-closed Swedish mine.

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It was far too heavy to be coal:

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it was called ytterbite, after Ytterby, the
nearby town.

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Nowadays, we understand the basics of chemistry.

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We've named all the natural elements and we've
made our own.

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But back then, it wasn't just that there were
gaps in the periodic table,

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it's that there wasn't a periodic table at
all.

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Heck, when Gadolin was given the rock from
this mine,

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Lavoisier, known as the father of chemistry,

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had only just published the paper setting
forward the theory of elements:

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and even he speculated that those elements
might include light and "caloric",

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an invisible fluid that explained how heat
worked.

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It was plausible at the time.

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The way to work out whether something was
a new element was basically:

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do stuff to it and see what happened.

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Which is still the technique today,

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it's just that "do stuff to it" is now defined
as

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"smash atoms together in a particle accelerator

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and track the bits of radiation given out
as the results decay".

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For centuries, though, it was things like

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"heat stuff up and see what wavelengths of
light come out"

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or "put different voltages of electricity
through it and see how the current changes".

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The big problem was that the samples that
those chemists were working with

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weren't anything close to pure,

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and they couldn't know how to purify something

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that hadn't been discovered yet.

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So they had to work out:

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was that a new element that they were looking
at,

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or just a combination of known ones?

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So papers were published that turned out later
to be completely wrong,

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and were corrected by others: which is great,
because that's how science works,

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but it also means that a lot of people and
places

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that might have had elements named after them
were disappointed.

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Canada, Norway, Russia, unlucky.

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Here, though?

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Ah, there were discoveries to be made.

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Through the 19th century, Gadolin and other
chemists

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found that the black rocks from this mine
had not one,

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but four new elements that were completely
unknown to science.

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And they were all named after here: yttrium,
terbium, erbium, and ytterbium,

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making this small town in Sweden

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the only place in the world with four elements
named after it.