9781422285640

12 Uranium

Pitchblende (the black bands) in uranium ore.

No one at the time linked the ailments to the black tar that the miners pulled out of the earth. However, one of those rocks eventually found its way into the hands of Martin Klaproth, a would-be Catholic priest who had taught himself chemistry. In 1789, Klaproth examined the pitchblende and purified it into a “new element which I see as a strange kind of half-metal.” Klaproth’s new element created vibrant shades of greens and yellows when he added it to glass. Klaproth could have named the element after himself, but he didn’t. Instead, he named it uranium , after the newly discovered planet, Uranus, which was named for the Greek god of the sky. Klaproth, however, had not discovered uranium in its pure form—what he found was a compound of the element that’s present in pitchblende, a black mineral consisting mainly of uranium oxide. It wasn’t until in 1841 that a French chemist, Eugène Péligot, isolated pure uranium.