Ekeberg, Anders Gustaf

Anders Gustaf Ekeberg (1767-1813) Heinrich Rose (1795-1864) distinguished tantalum from niobium. 

Since minerals which contain niobium almost invariably contain also the closely related element, tantalum, it is small wonder that chemists at first confused the two elements. The discoverer of tantalum was the Swedish chemist and mineralogist Anders Gustaf Ekeberg. He was born at Stockholm on January 16, 1767, the son of Joseph Erik Ekeberg, a... 

Anders Gustaf Ekeberg, 1767-1813. Swedish chemist, mineralogist, poet, and artist. Professor of Chemistry at Upsala when Berzelius was a student there. The discoverer of tantalum. He was one of the first chemists to investigate yttria. 

Birth of Anders Gustaf Ekeberg, the discoverer of tantalum, at Stockholm. 

Swedish chemist and mineralogist Anders Gustaf Ekeberg dis-... 

Then, too, the English chemist Smithson Tennant (1761-1815), for whom Wollaston had worked as an assistant, discovered osmium and iridium. Another English chemist, Charles Hatchett (c. 1765-1847), isolated columbium (now olEcially called niobium), while a Swedish chemist, Anders Gustaf Ekeberg (1767-1813), discovered tantalum. 

Discovery Anders Gustaf Ekeberg in Uppsala discovered the oxide of an unknown metal in a mineral from Ytterby near Stockholm in 1802. He gave the new element the name tantalum after Tantalus in Greek mythology. The first ductile tantalum, manufactured by W. von Bolton in Germany 1903, was used for the metal filament in electric light bulbs. 

A. Lundgren, Anders Gustaf Ekeberg, the Antiphlogistic Chemistry and the Swedish Scene, Berzelius Society, Serie no 5, The Royal Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden, ISSN 1103-5129,1997 Larry D. Cunningham, Tantalum chapter in Mineral Commodity Summaries 2003, uses, Reston, VA, pp. 168-169 and Columbium (Niobium) and Tantalum chapter in Minerals Yearbook, 2001, Vol. I, Metals and Minerals, USGS, Re-... 

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