Vilnius, Lithuania/vilnius920
Previous | Home | NextDr. Biruté is clarifying key passages from her book and is sharing extra information that gives further insight to events of Sniadecki's time. It is clear that unfortunately the discovery of ruthenium is wishful thinking and that Sniadecki's "vestium" (observed as "red needles") was not ruthenium. No one can reinvestigate his material, because in 1840 all his samples were sent to the University of Kiev, Ukraine, (formerly Russia) never to be seen again. However, the authors have subsequently shown in extensive laboratory work that his "vestium" was actually an artifact of palladium chloride, PdCl2, which was created while the majority of the palladium had been converted to a hexachlorocomplex: G. B. Kauffmann, J. L. Marshall and V. R. Marshall, Chem. Educator, 19, 106-115 (May 13, 2014); also J. L. Marshall and V. R. Marshall, "The Legend of Vestium," ACS Nat'l Meeting, San Francisco, Aug 11, 2014) . Sniadecki was working with such a limited amount of material that it was impossible to detect the minute amounts of ruthenium which may have been present in his platinum ore. Since his work was performed before the Russian discoveries of platinum ore in the Urals in the 1820s, his platinum was from the New World, most probably Colombia {LINK: to Columbia}. The discovery of ruthenium had to wait until 1844, when prodigious quantities of platinum ore became available to Klaus for his work {LINK: to Kazan}.
