Overview

Tantalum was discovered in 1802 by the Swedish chemist Anders Gustaf Ekeberg, in minerals from Scandinavia. He named it after Tantalus of Greek myth. For decades it was confused with niobium, which occurs alongside it, until the two were finally distinguished in the 1840s and 1860s. Tantalum is a hard, blue-grey, extremely corrosion-resistant metal, biologically inert and so used in surgical implants, and above all in the tiny high-capacity capacitors of mobile phones and computers. Biologically inert and highly resistant to corrosion, tantalum is used in surgical implants and instruments and in chemical-plant equipment that must withstand hot acids, as well as in the compact capacitors that store charge throughout modern electronics.

Tantalum has become one of the most closely watched conflict minerals of the smartphone era: much of the world's supply is drawn from coltan, a tantalum-niobium ore mined in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where revenue from artisanal mines has at times funded armed militias, prompting the tantalum-specific due-diligence and disclosure requirements written into the United States' 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and similar European Union regulation aimed at tracing the metal's supply chain back to its source.