He discovered the element after being sent a sample of "brown lead" ore (plomo pardo de Zimapán, now named vanadinite).
The French chemist Hippolyte Victor Collet-Descotils incorrectly declared that del Río's new element was only impure chromium.
He chose to call the element vanadin in Swedish (which has become vanadium in other languages including German and English) after the Old Norse Vanadís, another name for the Norse Vanr goddess Freyja, whose facets include connections to beauty and fertility, because of the many beautifully colored chemical compounds it produces.
[10][12] Gadolinite, a mineral (from Ytterby, a village in Sweden), consists of several compounds (oxides or earths): yttria, erbia (sub-component as ytterbia) and terbia.
[13][14] At last, a committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) resolved the dispute and adopted one name for each element.
The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna (then USSR, today Russia) named element 104 kurchatovium (Ku) in honor of Igor Kurchatov, father of the Soviet atomic bomb, while the University of California, Berkeley, US, named element 104 rutherfordium (Rf) in honor of Ernest Rutherford.
In June 1974, a Soviet team led by G. N. Flyorov at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna reported producing the isotope 259106, and in September 1974, an American research team led by Albert Ghiorso at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley reported creating the isotope 263106.
In 1994, a committee of IUPAC recommended that element 107 be named bohrium (Bh), also in honor of Niels Bohr but using his surname only.
While this conforms to the names of other elements honoring individuals where only the surname is taken, it was opposed by many who were concerned that it could be confused with boron, which is called borium in some languages including Latin.
In 1997, a committee of IUPAC recommended that element 108 be named hassium (Hs), in honor of the German state of Hesse (or Hassia in Latin).
This state includes the city of Darmstadt, which is home to the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research where several new elements were discovered or confirmed.