A Russian Name

Ruthenium's name is a patriotic one, honouring the Russian empire from whose Ural platinum deposits it was drawn and where Claus made his discovery. An earlier chemist, Gottfried Osann, had proposed the name for a substance he thought he had found in the same ores, but it was Claus who properly isolated and characterised the metal and who retained the name in tribute to his country. Ruthenium has no mythological or alchemical past, being a nineteenth-century discovery among the platinum metals, all of which reached European science late; its name simply marks the geography of its origin, the Russian mines that were then the world's great source of platinum-group metals.

Osann's earlier, ultimately unfounded claim is a genuine footnote in the priority record: in 1828 he announced not one but three supposed new metals from Ural platinum residues, tentatively named pluranium, polinium and ruthenium, but could not reliably reproduce his results and eventually withdrew the claims under scrutiny from Berzelius. Claus returned to the same class of residues more than a decade later, isolated a genuine new element, and chose to keep Osann's discarded name ruthenium as a gesture of scientific courtesy even though Osann's own work had not actually characterised the true element.