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What
the name means:
Tellurium was named after the Roman goddess
of the Earth, Tellus.
Who
identified
tellurium? In
1782, Baron Franz Joseph Muller von
Reichenstein was analysing a mineral from a
mine in Romania. The mineral under
investigation contained a compound of gold
and another metal. Muller believed, at
first, that the second metal was bismuth.
Later he thought that it might be antimony.
However, by the following year, Muller had
concluded that the other metal in the
sample was not any of the known metals.
A few
years later Muller sent a sample of the
mineral to Martin Heinrich Klaproth in
Berlin. Klaproth isolated the new element
and proposed the name tellurium since, up
to then, no new element had been named
after the Earth.
About
tellurium: The
element tellurium is silvery-white and
shines like a metal. It can also be made
into a grey powder. It is found as the free
element in the Earth’s crust but it is
mostly found in chemical combination with
metals, such as gold. Tellurium is useful
to form alloys, with copper and steel, for
example. It is also used in ceramics.
Tellurium is toxic to humans and some
workers who came into contact with it
developed “garlic breath”, a sign of
tellurium poisoning. |
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