section_path: History/The Renaissance
section_name: The Renaissance
paragraph_text: The Renaissance
  
  The first systematic text on the arts of mining and metallurgy was De la Pirotechnia (1540) by Vannoccio Biringuccio, which treats the examination, fusion, and working of metals.
  
  Sixteen years later, Georgius Agricola published De Re Metallica in 1556, an account of the profession of mining, metallurgy, and the accessory arts and sciences, an extensive treatise on the chemical industry through the sixteenth century.
  
  He gave the following description of a metal in his De Natura Fossilium (1546):
  
  Metal is a mineral body, by nature either liquid or somewhat hard. The latter may be melted by the heat of the fire, but when it has cooled down again and lost all heat, it becomes hard again and resumes its proper form. In this respect it differs from the stone which melts in the fire, for although the latter regain its hardness, yet it loses its pristine form and properties.
  
  Traditionally there are six different kinds of metals, namely gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, and lead. There are really others, for quicksilver is a metal, although the Alchemists disagree with us on this subject, and bismuth is also. The ancient Greek writers seem to have been ignorant of bismuth, wherefore Ammonius rightly states that there are many species of metals, animals, and plants which are unknown to us. Stibium when smelted in the crucible and refined has as much right to be regarded as a proper metal as is accorded to lead by writers. If when smelted, a certain portion be added to tin, a bookseller's alloy is produced from which the type is made that is used by those who print books on paper.
  
  Each metal has its own form which it preserves when separated from those metals which were mixed with it. Therefore neither electrum nor Stannum is of itself a real metal, but rather an alloy of two metals. Electrum is an alloy of gold and silver, Stannum of lead and silver. And yet if silver be parted from the electrum, then gold remains and not electrum; if silver be taken away from Stannum, then lead remains and not Stannum.
  
  Whether brass, however, is found as a native metal or not, cannot be ascertained with any surety. We only know of the artificial brass, which consists of copper tinted with the colour of the mineral calamine. And yet if any should be dug up, it would be a proper metal. Black and white copper seem to be different from the red kind.
  
  Metal, therefore, is by nature either solid, as I have stated, or fluid, as in the unique case of quicksilver.
  
  But enough now concerning the simple kinds.
  
  Platinum, the third precious metal after gold and silver, was discovered in Ecuador during the period 1736 to 1744 by the Spanish astronomer Antonio de Ulloa and his colleague the mathematician Jorge Juan y Santacilia. Ulloa was the first person to write a scientific description of the metal, in 1748.
  
  In 1789, the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth isolated an oxide of uranium, which he thought was the metal itself. Klaproth was subsequently credited as the discoverer of uranium. It was not until 1841, that the French chemist Eugène-Melchior Péligot, prepared the first sample of uranium metal. Henri Becquerel subsequently discovered radioactivity in 1896 using uranium.
  
  In the 1790s, Joseph Priestley and the Dutch chemist Martinus van Marum observed the effect of metal surfaces on the dehydrogenation of alcohol, a development which subsequently led, in 1831, to the industrial scale synthesis of sulphuric acid using a platinum catalyst.
  
  In 1803, cerium was the first of the lanthanide metals to be discovered, in Bastnäs, Sweden by Jöns Jakob Berzelius and Wilhelm Hisinger, and independently by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in Germany. The lanthanide metals were regarded as oddities until the 1960s when methods were developed to more efficiently separate them from one another. They have subsequently found uses in cell phones, magnets, lasers, lighting, batteries, catalytic converters, and in other applications enabling modern technologies.
  
  Other metals discovered and prepared during this time were cobalt, nickel, manganese, molybdenum, tungsten, and chromium; and some of the platinum group metals, palladium, osmium, iridium, and rhodium.