samarium

Samarium is a chemical element with atomic number 62 and the symbol Sm. It is a hard, silvery metal that oxidizes in air. Samarium has a variety of uses, the chief one being in samarium-cobalt magnets. Other uses include as a chemical catalyst, radioactive dating, and x-ray lasers. The radioactive samarium-153 is used as a chemotherapy agent, and samarium-149 is used to absorb neutrons in nuclear reactor control rods.

The element was first isolated by chemist Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1879. The name comes from samarskite, the mineral from which it was first isolated. De Boisbaudran wrote in the article announcing the discovery:

Ces réseryes faites, je propose le nom de samarium (symbole = Sm) dérivé de la racine qui a déjà servi à former le mot samarskite.

(These reservations made, I propose the name samarium (symbol = Sm) derived from the root which has already served to form the word samarskite.)

Samarskite, in turn, is named for mining engineer Vasili Yevgrafovich Samarsky-Bykhovets (1803–70), who was the head of the Russian Mining Engineering Corps 1845–61. Samarsky-Bykhovets provided mineral samples to mineralogists Gustav and Heinrich Rose, who named the mineral after him. The name samarskite appears in English by 1849. From James Nicol’s 1849 Manual of Mineralogy:

Hermann once thought that [sample] No. 4 contained the acid of a new metal, which he named ilmenium, but the researches of H. Rose have shown that this is niobic, mixed with tungstic acid, and the mineral identical with samarskite.

Sources:

de Boisbaudran, Paul Émile Lecoq. “Recherches sur le samarium, radical d’une terre nouvelle extraite de la samarskite.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences Publiés, 89, 28 July 1879, 212–214 at 214. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Nicol, James. Manual of Mineralogy. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1849, 286. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. samarium, n., samarskite, n.

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