Nils Gabriel Sefström, a student of Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius who is studying the brittleness of steel in 1830, rediscovers the element that Mexican mineralogist Andrés Manuel del Río had in 1801 named erythronium, dismissed at the time as impure chromium.

Sefström calls the element vanadium, after Vanadis, the Scandinavian goddess of beauty and youth, because of the beautiful colors of the element's compounds in solution.