Early analyses of emeralds and beryls always yielded similar elements, leading to the fallacious conclusion that both substances are aluminium silicates.

René Just Haüy discovered that both crystals show strong similarities, and he asked the chemist Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin for a chemical analysis.

Vauquelin was able to separate the aluminium from the beryllium by dissolving the aluminium hydroxide in an additional alkali.

[23] Vauquelin named the new element "glucinum" for the sweet taste of some of its compounds.

.[24]
Friedrich Wöhler[25] and Antoine Bussy[26] independently isolated beryllium in 1828 by the chemical reaction of metallic potassium with beryllium chloride, as follows:

BeCl2 + 2 K → 2 KCl + Be

The potassium itself had been produced by the electrolysis of its compounds, a newly-discovered process.

This chemical method yielded for them only small grains of beryllium from which no ingot of metal could be cast or hammered.

The direct electrolysis of a molten mixture of beryllium fluoride and sodium fluoride by Paul Lebeau in 1898 yielded the first significant pure samples of beryllium.

[24] It took until World War I (1914–18) before significant amounts of beryllium were produced, but its large-scale production was not started until early 1930s.

The rising demand for hard beryllium-copper alloys and fluorescent material for fluorescent lights during World War II caused the production of beryllium to soar.

In the first years most fluorescent lights used zinc orthosilicate with varying content of beryllium as greenish phosphor.

Small additions of magnesium tungstate improved the blue part of the spectrum yielding acceptable white.

After it was discovered that beryllium was toxic halophosphate based phosphors took over.

[27]
[edit]Etymology