Vanadium (named after Vanadis, the Scandinavian goddess of beauty) was originally discovered by Andrés Manuel del Río (a Spanish-born Mexican mineralogist) in Mexico City, in 1801. He discovered the element after being sent a sample of "brown lead" ore (now named vanadinite). Through experimentation, he found it to form salts with a wide variety of colors, so he named the element panchromium (Greek: all colors). He later renamed this compound erythronium, since most of the salts turned red when heated. The French chemist Hippolyte Victor Collet-Descotils incorrectly declared that del Río's new element was only impure chromium. Del Río thought himself to be mistaken and accepted the statement of the French chemist that was also backed by del Río's friend Baron Alexander von Humboldt.
In 1831, Sefström of Sweden rediscovered vanadium in a new oxide he found while working with some iron ores and later that same year Friedrich Wöhler confirmed del Río's earlier work. Later, George William Featherstonhaugh, one of the first US geologists, suggested that the element should be named "rionium" after del Río, but this never happened.
Metallic vanadium was isolated by Henry Enfield Roscoe in 1867, who reduced vanadium(III) chloride VCl3 with hydrogen.[3] The name vanadium comes from Vanadis, a goddess in Scandinavian mythology, because the element has beautiful multicolored chemical compounds.
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