LECOQ de BOISBAUDRAN, PAUL ÈMILE. - THE DISCOVERY OF SAMARIUM.

Nouvelles raies spectrales observées dans des substances extraites de la samarskite.

(Paris, Gauthier-Villars), 1879. 4to. No wrappers. In: "Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de L'Academie des Sciences", Tome 88, No 7. Pp. (313-) 352. (Entire issue offered). Boisbaudran's paper: pp. 322-324.

First apperance of the paper in which Boisbaudran revealed his discovery of a new earth that precipitated had a unique spectrum. De Boisbaudran named it samaria, after the mineral from which it was derived. The mineral samarskite is named for a Russian mining engineer and Chief of Staff - Corps of Mining Engineers, Colonel Vasili Evgrafovich Samarsky-Bykhovets.

"Samarium was discovered by French chemist Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1879. He noticed in his research that impure didymium (praseodymium and neodymium with other impurities), seemed to contain more than just didymium based on spectroscopic work on various rare-earth minerals. When Lecoq de Boisbaudran added ammonium hydroxide to a concentrate prepared from the mineral samarskite he observed a precipitate that formed before the didymium (Weeks and Leicester, 1968, p. 685).

Partington "Breakthroughs" 1879 C.

Order-nr.: 47275