Vanadium is a hard, gray metal primarily used as an alloy for strengthening steel. It was originally discovered by the Spanish-Mexican mineralogist Andres Manuel del Rio (1764-1849) in 1801. He called it erythronium. However, his European colleagues erroneously convinced him that his find was not a newly discovered metal, but merely impure chromium. Vanadium was not rediscovered until 1830, when Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Selfström was running tests on iron ore treated with hydrochloric acid to assess the iron's brittleness. The treatments resulted in a black powder precipitate. One of the metals in the powder resembled uranium or chromium, but it was actually neither. Selfström identified it as a new metal, and subsequent tests showed that the compounds of the metal were multi-colored. This led Selfström to name it vanadium, after Vanadis, another name for the Norse goddess Freyja, who wears a divinely bright...