...there have been victories at Châtillon and…

Martin H. Klaproth makes the actual identification of titanium’s oxide from Hungarian rutile deposits.

A German chemist working independently in 1795, he names its metal constituent titanium after the Titans, the giants of Greek mythology.

Martin Klaproth, who has continued the chemical investigations of Müller von Reichenstein, names the newly discovered metal tellurium, from Latin tellus, “the Earth”, in 1796.

Major breakthroughs in chemistry occur in 1803, with the identification of the elements rhodium and palladium (by William Hyde Wollaston); osmium and iridium (by Smithson Tennant); and cerium (by Wilhelm Hisinger, Jons Jakob Berzelius and Martin Heinrich Klaproth).

Another new earth, from the mineral later named gadolinite in Gadolin's honor, is reported independently in the literature in 1803 by several chemists, including Martin Heinrich Klaproth and, working together, Jöns Jakob Berzelius, and Wilhelm Hisinger.

The asteroid Ceres, which had just been discovered two years before, lends its name, as ceria, to the newly obtained earth.

Researchers refer to yttria and ceria as the rare earths, because they have been discovered in a rare mineral, and closely resemble other known earths.

The elements of which yttria and ceria were the oxides then receive the names yttrium and cerium, respectively.