Discovery Of Tantalum

In the middle of the 17th century, a very heavy black mineral (tantalum has a density of 16.68 g/cm³) found in North America was sent to the British Museum for safekeeping. After about 150 years, until 1801, the British chemist Charles Hatchett (C. Hatchett, 1765-1847) accepted the task of analyzing this ore in the British Museum, discovered a new element in it and named it columbium (later renamed niobium), which was in honor of the fact that the mineral where it was first discovered - Colombia.
The element Tantalum derives its name from Tantalus. In 1802, the Swedish chemist Anders Gustav Ekaberg (A.G. Ekaberg, 1767-1813), while analyzing a mineral (columbite-tantalum) in Scandinavia, caused their acid to produce a fluorinated complex salt. acid to produce fluorinated complex salts and then recrystallized them, thus discovering the new element, which he named Tantalum (tantalum) in reference to Tantalus, the son of the god Zeus in Greek mythology.

Because the properties of coltan and tantalum are so similar, it was once thought that they were the same element. in 1809, the British chemist William Hyde Wollaston compared the oxides of tantalum and coltan separately, and although he came up with different values of density, he concluded that they were the identical substances.

By 1844, Heinrich Rose (1795-1864), a German chemist, refuted the conclusion that tantalum and columbium were the same element and chemically determined that they were two different elements. He named the two elements "Niobium" and "Pelopium" after Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus and Pelops, the son of Tantalus in Greek mythology.
In 1864, Christian Wilhelm Blomstrand, Henri Edin St. Clair de Ville, and Louis-Joseph Trost, who had been a member of the family for over a decade, were invited to visit the city. -Louis Joseph Troost definitively proved that tantalum and niobium were two different chemical elements and determined the chemical formulas for a number of related compounds.
In the same year, de Marigny heated tantalum chloride in a hydrogen atmosphere, thus making tantalum metal for the first time by a reduction reaction. Earlier refinements of tantalum contained high levels of impurities, and the first pure tantalum was produced by Werner von Bolton in 1903.
Scientists were the first to extract tantalum (potassium heptafluorotantalate) from niobium (potassium pentafluorooxyniobate monohydrate) by means of layered crystallization. This method was discovered by de Marigny in 1866. The method used by scientists today is solvent extraction of tantalum solutions containing fluoride.