Ytterby mine
59.4265°N 18.3535°E · Q631733
4 English words in this atlas trace back to Ytterby mine. It sits in Sweden.
One small feldspar quarry outside Stockholm supplied the names of four separate chemical elements.
Carl Gustaf Mosander split the 'yttria' from Ytterby into three fractions in 1843 and named two of them erbia and terbia. The two names were later swapped by mistake, so today's erbium is what Mosander had called terbium. Yttrium, terbium and ytterbium all come from the same village name, making Ytterby the most prolific toponym in chemistry.
Its name is the middle syllables of a Swedish village, chopped out and given a Latin ending.
Carl Gustaf Mosander showed in 1843 that Gadolin's yttria from the Ytterby quarry was a mixture, and split off two more earths that he called erbia and terbia. The two names were later swapped in the literature, so modern terbium is not the fraction Mosander first called terbia. Terbium now does quiet work in the green phosphor of fluorescent lamps and in magnetostrictive alloys.
The fourth element to be cut out of the same Swedish quarry's name, and the one that kept the most letters.
Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac separated ytterbia from erbia in Geneva in 1878 and named it for Ytterby, where the parent mineral had come from. Georges Urbain later split that fraction again, yielding lutetium. Ytterbium is now used in the most accurate optical lattice clocks yet built.
One small quarry outside Stockholm has four elements named directly after it.
Johan Gadolin analyzed a heavy black mineral from the feldspar quarry at Ytterby in 1794 and found in it a new earth, later called yttria. Anders Gustaf Ekeberg named the earth for the village, and yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium all carry pieces of the same place name. Holmium, thulium and scandium were also first separated from minerals out of that one quarry.