Authored by Fathi Habashi
Joachimsthal in Saxony was an important silver mining district since the Middle Ages when around the 1770s production started to decrease and the mining town was about to become a ghost town. It was at that time that Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743-1817) a pharmacist in Berlin who became later professor of chemistry at the Royal Mining Academy, discovered that the black mineral in the ore can be used to give glass a brilliant yellow color with green fluorescence when added to the molten batch. He was also convinced that this mineral must have contained a new metal. This discovery coincided with the discovery in 1781 of a new planet in the solar system by his compatriot William Herschel who had immigrated to England in 1757 and called the planet Uranus. Hence Klaproth named the new metal “uranium” to honor his compatriot. In 1789 he was able to isolate a black heavy solid from the ore which he thought it to be the new metal. Since that time uranium started to play a dominant role in the history of medicine. The history of uranium is closely connected with the silver mining town Joachimsthal1 in the Erzgebirge on the border between Saxony and Bohemia (Figure 1). The town was founded in 1516 when few years earlier silver was discovered. Further settlings in the neighborhood, Freiberg (1168) and Schneeberg (1446) are also known by their silver discoveries. It was there in Joachimsthal that uranium was discovered but uranium industry went through many stages of prosperity and depression with different industrial products other than uranium till finally uranium became the most sought-after metal during World War II that started in Europe in 1939. Within few years of mining in the district, it became known that the miners in the town suffered from a mysterious sickness. It was also too often that the miners came across a heavy black mineral which was for them a bad luck because it did not contain silver (Figure 2). For this reason they called it “Pechblende” which is German for “the bad luck mineral”. Because it was black, it became known in English as “pitchblend”. Soon, the miners’ sickness was attributed to this black mineral.The town recognized remarkable prosperity, the population increased gradually, becoming the second largest town in Bohemia after Prague. However, during the religious war of 1546-1547 and the lack of pumps needed to remove water from the deep mines made it difficult to compete with silver from the new Spanish American colonies, which was arriving in increasing quantities on the European market. As a result, the town knew its depression and the population decreased drastically. With decreased silver production, Joachimsthal was about to become a ghost town when Martin Klaproth (1743-1817) (Figure 3) a pharmacist in Berlin who became later professor of chemistry at the Royal Mining Academy in Berlin, discovered that the black mineral from Joachimsthal can be used to give glass a brilliant yellow color with green fluorescence when added to the molten batch.
Klaproth was also convinced that this mineral must have contained a new metal. This discovery coincided with the discovery in 1781 of new planet in the solar system by his compatriot William Herschel and called the planet Uranus [2]. Hence Klaproth named the new metal “uranium” to honor his compatriot. In 1789 he was able to isolate a black heavy solid from the ore which he thought it to be the new metal.
Uranium in the Glass Industry
In 1851 the Austrian chemist, Adolf Patera (1819-1894) (Figure 4) at the Imperial Geological Institution in Vienna investigated the possibility of the commercial application of Klaproth’s discovery. He devised a procedure for preparing “uranium yellow” known at that time as “Uranoxyd-natron”. Consequently, a plant was built in 1854 next to the silver smelting operations to process this black uranium mineral for pigment manufacture which was kept a guarded secret and a monopoly of Bohemian glass manufacturers. In 1873, Joachimsthal suffered greatly from a fire and since the silver operation was becoming unprofitable the government of the then Austrian Empire decided to close all the mines.To read more about this article... Open access Journal of Current trends in Clinical & Medical sciences
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