Ytterbium - A METAL THAT BROUGHT ME TO SWEDEN!

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Do not repeat the experiments shown in this video!
It’s not for no reason that we decided to visit Sweden. We went there to visit a small Swedish village called Ytterby, after which four elements were named. Those four elements are yttrium, erbium, terbium, and ytterbium. The scientific history of this village began in the end of 18-th century when Lieutenant Carl Axel Arrhenius found an unidentified black mineral in a quartz mine. The nature itself contributed to this discovery because during the last ice age millions of tons of ice washed away a lot of excess impurities from the rocks of the Swedish isles, exposing the rock and making it easily accessible.
Seven years after Arrhenius’ discovery, a Finish chemist, Johan Gadolin, found a new and unknown back then element in such a black piece of rock and named it yttrium after that very village. Later on this same black rock was named gadolinite and some 130 years later other chemists extracted seven more rare-earth metals from yttrium. Four of those metals were named after the village of Ytterby. Nowadays Ytterby is not an extraordinary village which is inhabited by rich Swedes. A regular tourist would never guess that this village is a birthplace of many elements in the Mendeleev’s periodic table. There is no such other place like this in the whole world where so many rare-earth elements were discovered. The mine grassed over and hasn’t been used for over 80 years. Only this sign put up here in 1989 tells about this mine’s history.