Gallium

The history of Gallium is a scientific fable, that of the phantom element that gave its credentials to modern chemistry.

It all begins in 1871 with the visionary Russian Dimitri Mendeleev. By organizing the known elements, he left an empty space on his famous periodic table. With stunning audacity, he did not simply signal this absence; he created a profile of the unknown element, which he provisionally called 'Eka-Aluminum', predicting its mass, density, and even its low melting point.

Four years later, like a scientific detective, the Frenchman Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran triumphed over the enigma. By examining the light spectrum of a zinc ore from the Pyrenees, he noticed new spectral lines, revealing the presence of the missing element. He isolated it and gave it the name Gallium, in homage to his homeland, Gallia (Gaul).

Mendeleev was immediately notified and the perfect concordance between his prediction and Lecoq's discovery was a resounding victory for science. Gallium, this silvery metal that has the almost magical property of melting in the warmth of the hand, has gone from the status of chemical curiosity to that of silent pillar of our era. Today, it no longer just heats thermometers, but powers our phones, our 5G networks and satellites, proving that the greatest advances are sometimes written in the logic of the universe, simply waiting to be discovered.