The elements that the chemists had most difficulty in sorting out and
identifying were the heavy metals found in the "rare earths." There were
about twenty of them so mixed up together and so much alike as to baffle
all ordinary means of separating them. For a hundred years chemists
worked over them and quarreled over them before they discovered that
they had a commercial value. It was a problem as remote from
practicality as any that could be conceived. The man in the street did
not see why chemists should care whether there were two didymiums any
more than why theologians should care whether there were two Isaiahs.
But all of a sudden, in 1885, the chemical puzzle became a business
proposition. The rare earths became household utensils and it made a big
difference with our monthly gas bills whether the ceria and the thoria
in the burner mantles were absolutely pure or contained traces of some
of the other elements that were so difficult to separate.
This sudden change of venue from pure to applied science came about
through a Viennese chemist, Dr.
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