Nils Gabriel Sefström [SEP] date of death
Nils Gabriel Sefström
Nils Gabriel Sefström (2 June 1787 – 30 November 1845) was a Swedish chemist. Sefström was a student of Berzelius and, when studying the brittleness of steel in 1830, he rediscovered a new chemical element, to which he gave the name vanadium.
Vanadium was first discovered by the Spanish-Mexican mineralogist Andrés Manuel del Río in 1801. He named it erythronium. Friedrich Wöhler later confirmed that vanadium and erythronium were the same substance.
Sefström was member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
red upon heating. In 1805, French chemist Hippolyte Victor Collet-Descotils, backed by del Río's friend Baron Alexander von Humboldt, incorrectly declared that del Río's new element was only an impure sample of chromium. Del Río accepted Collet-Descotils' statement and retracted his claim.
In 1831, Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström rediscovered the element in a new oxide he found while working with iron ores. Later that year, Friedrich Wöhler confirmed del Río's earlier work. Sefström chose a name beginning with V,