Ytterbium completes the remarkable quartet, yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium, whose names are all made from the syllables of a single Swedish place. That one small quarry should have named four elements, and supplied the ores for several more, is unmatched anywhere in the periodic table, and it stands as a monument to the Scandinavian chemists who did so much of the painstaking work of separating the lanthanides. Ytterbium has no mythological or alchemical association, being a nineteenth-century discovery; its identity is purely geographical, the final and most complete echo of Ytterby. Its later value in atomic clocks lends the humble village name an unexpected role at the frontier of precision timekeeping.
Thin foils of ytterbium change their electrical resistance in a precise, repeatable way when subjected to a sudden shock wave, a property that has made ytterbium gauges a standard tool for measuring the fleeting pressures generated in explosives testing and other high-speed impact research, translating a violent, microsecond event into a readable electrical signal. The element's comparative ease of preparation, unusual among the lanthanides, also made it one of the more affordable rare earths for such specialised instrumentation.