Scandium was discovered in 1879 by the Swedish chemist Lars Fredrik Nilson, who found it in the rare minerals euxenite and gadolinite. He named it after Scandinavia, the region whose ores had yielded it. Scandium is a light, silvery transition metal, rare and expensive to extract, used in small amounts in high-performance aluminium alloys and in certain intense lamps. Even a small addition of scandium markedly strengthens aluminium, a property exploited in aerospace parts and high-end bicycle frames, while scandium iodide gives some stadium and film-set lamps their intense, daylight-like glow; the pure metal remains rare and expensive.
Scandium is more common in the Earth's crust than gold or silver but almost never concentrates into workable ore bodies, so nearly all of it is recovered as a byproduct of processing uranium, tin, tungsten or rare-earth ores, and world production remains only a few tonnes a year. The Soviet Union was an early industrial adopter, using scandium-aluminium alloys in some military aircraft and, reportedly, in components of the Soyuz rocket family, prizing the modest weight saving enough to justify the metal's high cost where performance mattered more than price, and its price has kept scandium a specialist material even where its strengthening effect on aluminium is well proven.