History Of The Earth

Vanadium is a metal, and by far its greatest use is in steel alloys, where tiny amounts of vanadium improve steel’s hardness, toughness, and wear resistance, especially at extreme temperatures. As I reported in my book What Things Are Made Of, more than 650 tons of vanadium was alloyed with iron to make the steel in the Alaska Pipeline, and there’s no good substitute for vanadium in strong titanium alloys used in jet planes and other aerospace applications. Vanadium isn’t exactly one of the well-known elements, but in terms of abundance in the earth’s crust, most estimates indicate that there’s more vanadium than copper, lead, or tin. But it’s difficult to isolate, and it wasn’t produced chemically as a chloride until 1830, when Swedish chemist Nils Sefström named it for the Norse goddess of beauty, Vanadis, perhaps better known as Freyja. It wasn’t until 1867 that pure vanadium metal was isolated by British chemist Henry Roscoe, whose work on vanadium won him the name of the vanadium mica roscoelite.As a mi