Palladium

Palladium was discovered in 1802 by the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston, who separated it from crude platinum and, unusually, first offered it for sale anonymously before disclosing his method. He named it after the asteroid Pallas, which the astronomer Heinrich Olbers had discovered only months earlier. Palladium is a soft, silvery-white member of the platinum group, remarkable for absorbing large volumes of hydrogen, and central to catalytic converters and electronics. Palladium's appetite for hydrogen and its power to speed reactions make it vital to exhaust catalysts, to hydrogen purification and to electronic components, and it is also worked, like the other platinum metals, into fine jewellery and dental alloys.

Wollaston's method of announcing palladium was unusually theatrical: in 1803 he had the mineral dealer Jacob Forster quietly offer samples for sale in a London shop as new silver, without revealing his own involvement, prompting the Irish chemist Richard Chenevix to publicly denounce the substance as a fraudulent alloy of platinum and mercury. Only in 1805 did Wollaston step forward, read a paper to the Royal Society, and claim credit, vindicating the discovery and embarrassing Chenevix, a rare case in the history of the periodic table where a new element was first launched not through a scientific journal but through an anonymous shop-window sale.

The name reaches through the asteroid to Greek myth. The minor planet Pallas was itself named for Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom and just war, and behind her stands the Palladium, the ancient wooden image of Athena believed to have fallen from heaven and to protect the city of Troy so long as it remained within the walls; the theft of the Palladium by Odysseus and Diomedes was said to have sealed Troy's fall. Wollaston, naming his metal after the freshly found asteroid, thus unknowingly tied it to one of the most potent talismanic objects of classical legend, a sacred statue whose presence guaranteed a city's safety. The link is one of astronomical naming rather than any property of the metal, but it gives palladium the richest mythological pedigree of the platinum group.

Olbers named Pallas himself in 1802, continuing the era's fashion for classical mythological names in the newly opened field of asteroid astronomy; it was his second asteroid, Vesta, that he invited the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to name five years later. In an unexpected modern echo of its ancient protective reputation, palladium's price surged past gold's in December 2018 for the first time in sixteen years, driven by tightening automotive emissions standards that increased catalytic converter demand, a purely industrial and financial development that nonetheless briefly made this myth-laden metal literally more precious than gold.