Who discovered the chromium element?

Prof Louis Nicolas Vauquelin (Saint-André-d’Hébertot, France, 16 May 1763 – Saint-André-d’Hébertot, France, 14 November 1829) was a French pharmacist and chemist. He was the discoverer of both chromium and beryllium.

Chromium minerals as pigments came to the attention of the west in the eighteenth century. On July 26, 1761, Johann Lehmann found an orange-red mineral in a mine in Siberia, which he named Siberian red lead. The mineral was in fact crocoite.

In 1770, Peter Pallas visited the same site as Lehmann and found a red lead mineral that was discovered to possess useful properties as a pigment in paints. After Pallas, the use of Siberian red lead as a paint pigment began to develop rapidly throughout the region. Crocoite would be the principal source of chromium in pigments until the discovery of chromite many years later.

In 1798, while working with a red lead mineral from Siberia known as crocolite, he isolated the new element chromium - so called because its compounds are very highly coloured.

Chromium is a blue-white metal that is hard, brittle and very corrosion resistant. Chromium can be polished to form a very shiny surface and is often plated to other metals to form a protective and attractive covering. It's added to steel to harden it and to form stainless steel, a steel alloy that contains at least 10% chromium. Other chromium-steel alloys are used to make armor plate, safes, ball bearings and cutting tools.