Gottfried Osann

Gottfried Wilhelm Osann (26 October 1796, Weimar – 10 August 1866, Würzburg) was a German chemist and physicist.

They dissolved platinum ore from the Ural Mountains in aqua regia and sifted through the residue.

Where Berzelius found nothing, Osann thought he had detected three new metals and named them pluranium (concatenation of platinum and Ural), ruthenium (after Ruthenia, the Latin name for Rus) and polinium (from the Greek word polia, meaning grey-haired, for its residue color; not to be confused with polonium, discovered later).

[1][2] However, the quantity of the metals was too small to isolate, and Osann eventually withdrew his discovery claims.

[3] It was up to the Russian chemist Karl Klaus to verify their existence, which he did in 1844 by isolating measurable quantities of ruthenium.