Overview

Vanadium was first encountered in 1801 by the Spanish-Mexican mineralogist Andres Manuel del Rio, who believed he had found a new metal but was persuaded he had merely seen impure chromium and withdrew his claim. It was rediscovered in 1830 by the Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefstrom, and isolated later by Henry Roscoe. Vanadium is a hard, silvery transition metal chiefly valued for the strength and resilience it lends to steel. Small additions of vanadium produce the tough vanadium steels used in tools, springs and structural parts, while vanadium compounds serve as industrial catalysts and are being developed for the large flow batteries proposed to store energy from wind and solar power.

Del Rio first called his discovery panchromium, for the many colours its salts displayed, and then renamed it erythronium, before French chemists persuaded him he had merely mistaken impure chromium and he withdrew the claim, a retraction he reportedly regretted for the rest of his life once Sefstrom's independent rediscovery three decades later proved him right all along. Henry Ford was an early and enthusiastic industrial adopter, using vanadium steel in the chassis of the 1908 Model T for its unusual combination of strength and light weight, a choice that helped establish vanadium alloys as a mainstay of the automotive and tool-making industries.