Who discovered Jamaica?
Jamaica is believed to have been first discovered and settled by the Arawak and Taino indigenous people sometime between 4000 and 1000 BC. It was first discovered by Europeans in 1494 when Christopher Columbus landed in Discovery Bay, although some claim he landed in St. Ann’s Bay. He claimed Jamaica for Spain after landing and the first Spanish settlement was established 15 years later in 1509. The first settlement was named Sevilla, but it was abandoned in 1524. The capital was moved to Spanish Town, then called “St. Jago de la Vega,” which remained the capital of the country until the 19th century. Kingston was made the capital of Jamaica in 1872.

Did you know?
Spanish Town has the oldest cathedral of any British colony in the Caribbean.

Related Articles

Where are the West Indies Located

Interesting Facts About Cuba

Who discovered ruthenium?
Ruthenium was discovered in 1844 by Russian scientist Karl Klaus. He had isolated the metal from platinum residues while working at Kazan University. He was able to obtain 6 grams of the metal from crude platinum. He named the element Ruthenium, which was from the Latin word Ruthenia (the word was used to describe a region in Eastern Europe including Russia).

Did you know?
Ruthenium was once thought to have been isolated by Polish chemist J?drzej ?niadecki in 1807. However, his work was never confirmed and he later withdrew his claim. In 1827 chemists Jöns Berzelius and Gottfried Osann were examining the reside left after obtaining the pure platinum. Osann thought he had found 3 new metals, but Berzelius disagreed and this ended up causing a huge feud between the two men. Klaus later showed that Osann was correct and that he had indeed found 3 new metals!

Related Articles

Uses of Ruthenium

Who Discovered Platinum

Who discovered technetium?
The existence of technetium was first proposed long before it was discovered. The early forms of the periodic table created in the 1860′s by Dimitri Mendeleev had a gap between elements 42 and 44 because scientists before this time had already predicted the missing element. There were many claims of discovery from 1828 through to 1925 when German chemists Walter Noddack, Otto Berg, and Ida Tacke reported the discovery of element 43, which they named masurium. However, their experiments were not able to be repeated and it was thought to be an error.

The official discovery of technetium occurred in 1936 during an experiment at the University of Palermo in Sicily, Italy. Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè are today credited with the discovery of technetium. This element was the first artificially synthesized element to be discovered and the scientists gave it the name technetium after the Greek word meaning artificial.

In 1962 an extremely small quantity of naturally occurring technetium was discovered as a spontaneous fission product of uranium.

Related Articles

How Many Naturally Occurring Elements are There on Earth

Who Discovered Uranium

Who discovered The Cape of Good Hope?
The Cape of Good Hope was first discovered by Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. Dias named it the Cape of Storms, but it was later renamed to the Cape of Good Hope by John II, who was the King of Portugal. He decided to use this name due to the excitement surrounding opening a sea route to Asia. 11 years after the discovery of the cape the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama reached India using the sea route discovered by Dias.

Did you know?
Bartolomeu Dias actually sailed around the cape earlier in 1488, but didn’t realize it because he had traveled too far south. He actually discovered the cape on his return trip!

Dias died on May 29, 1500 when a huge storm off the cape sunk his ship.

Related Article

Interesting Facts about South Africa

Who discovered rubidium?
Rubidium was discovered by German scientists Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff in 1861. A year earlier they have invented a type of spectroscope (spectrometer), which is an instrument used to measure the different properties of light. This can be used to identify the molecular or atomic structure of a substance. It was with this instrument that Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff discovered the element rubidium. They named it after the latin word rubidus, which means dark red, because of the red lines they observed while using the spectroscope.

Did you know?
Bunsen and Kirchhoff used the same technique to discover cesium a year earlier. Since 1990, the Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award is awarded to for outstanding achievement in the field of spectroscopy.

Robert Bunsen is also known as the co-inventor of the Bunsen burner, which is commonly used in laboratories and schools around the world.

Related Articles

Who Discovered Rhodium

Who Discovered Ytterbium

Who discovered rhodium?
Rhodium was discovered in 1803 by English chemist William Hyde Wollaston. He had earlier discovered the first method for processing platinum ore and it was during this process that he discovered the element rhodium. This occurred after he had removed the platinum and palladium from the crude platinum ore and was left with a dark red powder. This powder contained rhodium chloride salts and he was able to obtain the pure rhodium from this substance by treating it with hydrogen gas. Rhodium was named after the rose color of the rhodium chloride salts and comes from the Greek word “rhodon,” which means rose.

Did you know?
Wollaston also discovered palladium earlier in 1803 while processing platinum ore. Palladium is also considered to be a noble metal.

Related Articles

Uses of Rhodium

Who Discovered Platinum

Who discovered platinum?
Platinum was already well known to the South American natives, who used it to produce artifacts. The first European reference to this metal dates back to 1557 in the writings of Italian physician Julius Caesar Scaliger, who described an unknown metal. However, it wasn’t discovered by the scientific community until the 1700′s.

In 1741, the British metallurgist Charles Wood found platinum samples that had been smuggled to Jamaica. He sent these to his relative William Brownrigg who documented Wood’s experiments and completed some more of his own. Through these experiments he was the first to recognize platinum as a new element and in 1950 encouraged The Royal Society to further investigate this metal.

Spanish explorer Antonio de Ulloa is also credited with the discovery of platinum. He published a report in 1748 detailing his time in South America, including the discovery of platinum and some of its properties. Both of these events led to further scientific investigation of platinum.

Related Articles

Who Discovered Palladium

Uses of Rhodium

Who discovered palladium?
Palladium was discovered in 1803 by English chemist William Hyde Wollaston. He discovered palladium while conducting experiments on platinum ore with a highly corrosive mixture of acids called aqua regia. He had been throwing the left over solution away. However, one day he decided to study the solution and after adding mercury cyanide and following a number of purification processes he was left with a white metal. He named his discovery palladium after the newly discovered asteroid Pallas. He announced the discovery by offering small samples of the metal at a shop in London in 1803, but did not disclose that he had discovered of palladium until 1805.

Did you know?
Irish chemist Richard Chenevix was not convinced that palladium was a new element and was suspicious of the fact that no one had claimed the discovery. In 1803 he declared it was no more than a alloy of platinum and mercury and he claimed the discovery as fraudulent. This caused much controversy and eventually involved Joseph Banks, who was the president of the Royal Society. These men wanted to find the person who had discovered palladium.

Related Articles

Who Discovered Ytterbium

Who Discovered Cadmium

Who discovered ytterbium?
Ytterbium was discovered in 1878 by the famous Swiss chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac. He had recently discovered a new component in a type of Earth that was known as Erbia. He named this component ytterbia and hypothesized that it was a compound of a new element, which he named ytterbium. This hypothesis wasn’t confirmed until 1907 when French chemist Georges Urbain was able to separate ytterbia into two elements ytterbium and lutetium. It is thought that Austrian scientist Carl Auer von Welsbach also did this around the same time. The physical and chemical properties of the element were not discovered until the mid 1950′s when the first almost pure ytterbium metal was produced.

Did you know?
Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac also discovered gadolinium, 2 years after his discovery of Ytterbium.

Related Articles

Who Discovered Gadolinium

Who Discovered Selenium

The theory
The existence of the Kuiper belt was theorized long before its discovery. Astronomers such as Frederick C. Leonard, Kenneth Edgeworth, Gerard Kuiper (after whom this region is named), Fred Whipple and physicist Al G.W. Cameron, all hypothesized about a region beyond Neptune. In 1977, astronomer Charles Kowal discovered a planetoid between Saturn and Uranus and in 1992 another similar object was found. These discoveries, along with the study of the finite lifespan of comets, led astronomers to theorize that these objects must come from an outer region.

Who discovered the Kuiper belt?
The discovery of the Kuiper belt can be traced back to 1987 when astronomer David Jewitt was surprised that the outer Solar System was so empty. He worked with graduate student Jane Luu to discover an object beyond the orbit of Pluto. After 5 years of searching they announced the discovery of the first object in the Kuiper belt. They nicknamed the object “Smiley,” but this was already used for the name of an asteroid. Today the object is known as (15760) 1992 QB1 and it remains unnamed. Six months later they discovered another object in the region.

Related Articles

Who Discovered the Asteroid Belt

What are Comets Made of