vanadium (V), chemical element, silvery white soft metal of Group 5 (Vb) of the periodic table. It is alloyed with steel and iron for high-speed tool steel, high-strength low-alloy steel, and wear-resistant cast iron.
Vanadium was discovered (1801) by the Spanish mineralogist Andrés Manuel del Río, who named it erythronium but eventually came to believe it was merely impure chromium. The element was rediscovered (1830) by the Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström, who named it after Vanadis, the Scandinavian goddess of beauty and youth, a name suggested by the beautiful colours of vanadium’s compounds in solution. The English chemist Henry Enfield Roscoe first isolated the metal in 1867 by hydrogen reduction of vanadium dichloride, VCl2, and the American chemists John Wesley Marden and Malcolm N. Rich obtained it 99.7 percent pure in 1925 by reduction of vanadium pentoxide, V2O5, with calcium metal.
