This Day in Science History - January 12 - Johan Arfwedson and Lithium

January 12^th is Johan Arfwedson's birthday. Arfwedson was a Swedish chemist who discovered the element lithium. He was from a wealthy family and matriculated early from Uppsala University and completed a Law degree and a degree in mineralogy. The law degree allowed him to manage his family's wealth and the mineralogy degree allowed him to keep busy as an unpaid secretary and notary at the Royal Bureau of Mines at Stockholm. There, he struck up a friendship with Jöns Jacob Berzelius and was given access to his private laboratory. He discovered a salt of a new element while investigating the mineral petalite. He believed he could extract the metal from the salt with electrolysis, but could not accomplish the task.

Lithium would wait until 1855 to be isolated as a pure metal when Humphrey Davy extracted it from lithium chloride through electrolysis. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

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