Pure barium in an argon atmosphere to keep it from reacting with the air
17 February 2023
Barium is a soft, silvery alkaline earth metal. It has atomic number 56 and the symbol Ba. It has few industrial uses and is perhaps chiefly known for its medical use as a radio-contrasting agent in medical imaging. Barium is highly reactive and, as a result, is not found in nature in its pure form. Its ore has phosphorescent qualities. Barium was isolated and named by Humphry Davy in 1808.
Those phosphorescent qualities of the ore have been known for centuries, and since quantities of the ore are found near Bologna, Italy, it came to be known in early modern Latin as lapis bononiensis (Bononian or Bolognian stone). The English name of the ore is recorded in a 1657 translation of Pierre Gassendi’s life of Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius:
Now he was of opinion, that as the light of the Sun, and its heat is imprinted upon a Bononian stone: so the light and whitenesse are imprinted upon the vitreous humor, and by reason of their corpulency, create there a certain shaddow of themselves: but he was afterwards of opinion, that the shadow externally appearing, was not produced from the crassitude of the light or whitenesse, but feigned by a fault which may happen, not only in the vitreous, but also in the watery, and especially in the Crystalline humor.
And we see Bolognian stone in a 1712 translation of Pierre Pomet’s Compleat History of Druggs:
17. Of the Bolognian Stone.
Pomet. This is a heavy Stone of a shining Silver Grey, very like in Figure to the Nephritick Stone, which is found very commonly about Bologna in Italy, whence it takes its Name. This Stone is of no other Use than, after Calcination, to make the Phosphorus, of which Mr. Lemery treats so largely at the End of his Book of Chymistry; and likewise Mr. Worms, he having writ a long Discourse of it, whither those who desire to make it may have Recourse: The Bolognian Stone is not yet well known amongst us, which is the Cause we sell so little of it. Some call this Stone calcin’d, the Sun or Moon Spunge, the illuminated Stone; Lucifer, Cassiolanus his Stone, or Kercher’s Phosphorus.
But in the eighteenth century, because of its weight, chemists took to calling the ore barytes or baryta, from the Greek βαρύς (heavy) + -ῑτης (-ites, suffix used in the names of minerals). There is this from Adair Crawford’s 1789 On the Medicinal Properties of Muriated Barytes:
In the year 1784 I made several experiments and observations on the medicinal properties of the Muriated Barytes, from which I concluded, that it might probably possess considerable powers as a deobstruent.
Chemist Humphry Davy isolated the element from its ore in 1808 and dubbed it barium. From his paper announcing the discovery:
These new substances will demand names; and on the same principles as I have named the bases of the fixed alkalis, potassium and sodium, I shall venture to denominate the metals from the alkaline earths barium, strontium, calcium, and magnium; the last of these words is undoubtedly objectionable, but magnesium has been already applied to metallic manganese, and would consequently have been an equivocal term.
Sources:
Crawford, Adair. “On the Medicinal Properties of Muriated Barytes” (1789). Medical Communications, vol. 2. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790, 301. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Davy, Humphry. “Electrochemical Researches on the Decompositions of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals Obtained from the Alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam Procured from Ammonia.” The Philosophical Magazine, 32, October–December 1808, 203. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
Gassendi, Pierre (Petrus Gassendus). The Mirror of True Nobility and Gentility. Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius, Lord of Pieresk, Senator of the Parliament of Aix. London: J. Streater for Humphrey Moseley, 1657, 102. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. barium, n., baria, n., baryta, n., barytes, n., Bologna, n.
Pomet, Pierre. A Compleat History of Druggs, vol. 1. London: R. Bonwicke, et al., 1712, 409. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Image credit: Matthias Zepper, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.