Mine Taberg

Vanadium was first discovered in 1801 by del Rio while he was examining a lead ore obtained from Zimapan, Mexico. The ore contained a new element and, because of the red color imparted to its salts on heating, it was named erythronium (redness). The identification of the element vanadium did not occur until 1830 when it was isolated from cast iron processed from an ore from mines near Taberg, Sweden. It was given the name vanadium after Vanadis, the Norse goddess of beauty. Shordy after this discovery, vanadium was shown to be identical to the erythronium that del Rio had found several years eadier. 

In 1831 the Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefstrom discovered a new element in iron from the Taberg mine in Smaland. Sefstrom was bom on June 2, 1787, at Ilsbo Socken, Norra Helsingland (2). He studied medicine, and received his medical degree at the age of twenty-six years. After four years of practice in a hospital, he became a professor of chemistry and science at the Caroline Institute of Medicine and Surgery, and from 1820 to 1839 he taught chemistry at the newly erected School of Mines at Falun (2,54). 

The cast iron in which Sefstrom discovered vanadium had been prepared from ore from the mine at Taberg, Sm land. When Daniel Tilas described this hill in 1760, he stated that iron had been smelted there since 1610 and that the supply of it was still almost inexhaustible (74). C. Beijell analyzed this ore in 1760 and found that it contained from 21 to 31.5 per cent of iron, that it was free from sulfur and arsenic, and that good, serviceable iron could be prepared from it (75). 

The details of N. G. Sefstrom s discovery of vanadium in soft iron from the Taberg Mine in Smaland, Sweden, and of F. Wohler s proof of the identity of erythronium and vanadium have already been related (14, 15, 16). Dr. Enrique Moles emphasized the fact that del Rio s own excessive modesty and scientific caution led him to renounce the discovery of the new element before the analysis of Collet-Descotils had been published. 

This weiy rare metal is found in smcdl quantity in the slag of the iron furnaces where the iron ore of Taberg, in Sweden, is smelted, also in the lead mines of Scotland, as vanadiate of lead, a mineral which likewise occurs in Mexico. The metal is brittle, very infusible, and nearly silver white. In its chemical relations it is somewhat analogous to chromium and, like it. 

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