Chromium was discovered in 1797 by the French chemist Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin, working with the bright orange-red Siberian mineral crocoite, from which he isolated the new metal the following year. Its name comes from the Greek chroma, colour, chosen because its compounds are so vividly and variously coloured. Chromium is a hard, lustrous, corrosion-resistant metal, the source of the mirror-bright finish called chrome and a key ingredient of stainless steel. It is added to steel to make it hard and rust-resistant, plated onto metal for a bright protective coating, and used in tanning leather and in pigments; in trace amounts it is also a dietary micronutrient. Vauquelin was remarkably prolific, also isolating beryllium in the same decade, and he first called his new element after the Siberian mineral crocoite's popular name, Siberian red lead, before settling on chromium for its colourful compounds.
In twentieth-century America chrome plating became a cultural symbol in its own right, the gleaming bumpers, grilles and trim of mid-century automobiles giving rise to the very idiom chrome to mean flashy or ostentatious, a linguistic legacy resting on a thin decorative layer of an element first drawn from a Russian mine.