ORigins and discovery
Swedish chemist J.J. Berzelius in 1815 named a material Thorium which he thought was a new element. He gave it the name Thorium to honor the Norse god of thunder. To his disappointment, he found out a few years later that this new element was actually just the phosphate of the already discovered yttrium. When a renowned mineralogist couldn't identify a black mineral that his son had found on the island of Lovo near Norway, he sent it to Berzelius. After analyzing the sample, Berzelius concluded that 60% of the sample was a new element, and he named this new element Thorium. He announced his discovery to the scientific community in 1829.