Hippolyte-Victor Collet-Descotils (November 21, 1773 in

Caen Caen (, ; nrf, Kaem) is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the department of Calvados. The city proper has 105,512 inhabitants (), while its functional urban area has 470,000,Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

) was a French chemist. He studied in the

École des Mines de Paris Mines Paris - PSL, officially École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris (until May 2022 Mines ParisTech, also known as École des mines de Paris, ENSMP, Mines de Paris, les Mines, or Paris School of Mines), is a French grande école and a c ...

, and was a student and friend of Louis Nicolas Vauquelin. He is best known for confirming the discovery of

chromium Chromium is a chemical element with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in group 6. It is a steely-grey, lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium metal is valued for its high corrosion resistance and hardne ...

by Vauquelin, and for independently discovering

iridium Iridium is a chemical element with the symbol Ir and atomic number 77. A very hard, brittle, silvery-white transition metal of the platinum group, it is considered the second-densest naturally occurring metal (after osmium) with a density of ...

in 1803. In 1806, Collet-Descotils misidentified erythronium, a new element discovered in Mexico by

Andrés Manuel del Río Andrés Manuel del Río y Fernández (10 November 1764 – 23 March 1849) was a Spanish– Mexican scientist, naturalist and engineer who discovered compounds of ''vanadium'' in 1801. He proposed that the element be given the name ''panchromium' ...

, thinking that it was chromium. This resulted in

Alexander von Humboldt Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 17696 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, p ...

rejecting Del Río's discovery. The same element was rediscovered thirty years later in Sweden and renamed as

vanadium Vanadium is a chemical element with the symbol V and atomic number 23. It is a hard, silvery-grey, malleable transition metal. The elemental metal is rarely found in nature, but once isolated artificially, the formation of an oxide layer ( pas ...

. In 1815, a few months before his death, he got the position of director of

, in charge of transferring the school to a new building. He is buried in the 10th Division of the Père Lachaise Cemetery of Paris.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Collet-Descotils, Hippolyte-Victor 1773 births 1815 deaths Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery Scientists from Caen 19th-century French chemists