Despite this he continued his important platiniferous work; and for “two full years I toiled at it from morning till late night, lived only in my laboratory, where I had my dinner and drank tea”. Ruthenium was once thought to have been isolated by Polish chemist J?drzej ?niadecki in 1807. Required fields are marked *, You can use these HTML tags and attributes
. In Hanau he made the acquaintance of W. C. Heraeus, who, like him, had been a pharmacist before starting his own business, and who was now the head of a small platinum workshop. While there he selected patterns for the proposed platinum coins whichwere introduced into the currency shortly afterwards. Berzelius quickly examined the material that he had been sent and reported back to Klaus, who was then still an unknown professor, that it was just a dirty salt of iridium; a conclusion that Berzelius published immediately (24). They were later published (17–19). Klaus then went to Switzerland and later to Paris, visiting the works of Henri Saint-Claire Deville, Chapuis and H. K. Desmoutis and F. A. Quennessen. It is interesting to note that in 1838 the Academy of Sciences awarded K. H. Gebel and Klaus the most prestigious Russian prize for the natural sciences - the Demidov Prize - for their investigations of the flora of the steppes during their 1834 expedition. By the way, I accidentally found out the presence of a new body, but I could not separate it at first” (13). What's in a name? Thus, he may be regarded as the creator of the chemistry of the platinum metals, and the one who introduced the concept of the structure of the “double salts and bases” of platinum, which was developed some forty years later by Alfred Werner in his co-ordination theory Klaus also discovered the similarities and differences between elements in the triads: ruthenium-rhodium-palladium and osmium-iridium-platinum, so providing the justification for Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev to include all six platinum metals in Group VIII of the Periodic System. There are reports that the Polish chemist Jedrzej Sniadecki discovered Ruthenium in 1807, however, he withdrew claims of discovering a new element. Ruthenium has a low crustal abundance of about 0.001 part per million. Although first identified in 1858, ruthenium tetroxide had been detected earlier by Klaus because of its smell. Ruthenium was discovered by Karl Karlovich Klaus, a Russian chemist, in 1844 while analyzing the residue of a sample of platinum ore obtained from the Ural mountains. Small amounts of ruthenium are added to platinum and palladium to strengthen them.