Ruthenium

Ruthenium was discovered in 1844 by the chemist Karl Ernst Claus, working at the University of Kazan, who isolated it from the residues of platinum ore from the Ural Mountains. He named it ruthenium, from Ruthenia, the Latin name for Russia and the Rus lands. It is a hard, brittle, silvery-white member of the platinum group, used to harden platinum and palladium alloys and in electrical contacts and catalysts. Ruthenium stiffens platinum and palladium for jewellery and electrical contacts, features in the resistors of microelectronics and in computer hard-disk coatings, and serves as a versatile catalyst in chemical synthesis. Claus, uncertain whether his find would be accepted, sent samples to the era's most authoritative chemist, Berzelius in Stockholm, whose confirmation was decisive in securing ruthenium's recognition as a genuine new element rather than an impure mixture of known platinum metals.

In recent decades ruthenium compounds have found a research role well beyond hardening jewellery: ruthenium-based dyes are central to experimental dye-sensitised solar cells, and ruthenium catalysts, including those developed by the chemist Robert Grubbs, enabled the olefin metathesis reactions honoured by the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Ruthenium's name is a patriotic one, honouring the Russian empire from whose Ural platinum deposits it was drawn and where Claus made his discovery. An earlier chemist, Gottfried Osann, had proposed the name for a substance he thought he had found in the same ores, but it was Claus who properly isolated and characterised the metal and who retained the name in tribute to his country. Ruthenium has no mythological or alchemical past, being a nineteenth-century discovery among the platinum metals, all of which reached European science late; its name simply marks the geography of its origin, the Russian mines that were then the world's great source of platinum-group metals.

Osann's earlier, ultimately unfounded claim is a genuine footnote in the priority record: in 1828 he announced not one but three supposed new metals from Ural platinum residues, tentatively named pluranium, polinium and ruthenium, but could not reliably reproduce his results and eventually withdrew the claims under scrutiny from Berzelius. Claus returned to the same class of residues more than a decade later, isolated a genuine new element, and chose to keep Osann's discarded name ruthenium as a gesture of scientific courtesy even though Osann's own work had not actually characterised the true element.