Group 12 element people in the 17th century. German chemist Andreas Marggraf is usually given credit for discovering pure metallic zinc in a 1746 experiment by heating a mixture of calamine and charcoal in a closed vessel without copper to obtain a metal. Experiments on frogs by the Italian doctor Luigi Galvani in 1780 with brass paved the way for the discovery of electrical batteries, galvanization and cathodic protection. In 1880, Galvani's friend, Alessandro Volta, invented the Voltaic pile. The biological importance of zinc was not discovered until 1940 when carbonic anhydrase, an enzyme that scrubs carbon dioxide from blood, was shown to
Period 6 element in 1839 as an impurity in cerium nitrate – hence the name "lanthanum", from the Ancient Greek "λανθάνειν" ("lanthanein"), meaning "to lie hidden". Although it is classified as a rare earth element, lanthanum is the 28th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, almost three times as abundant as lead. In minerals such as monazite and bastnäsite, lanthanum composes about a quarter of the lanthanide content. It is extracted from those minerals by a process of such complexity that pure lanthanum metal was not isolated until 1923. Lanthanum compounds have numerous applications as catalysts, additives in glass, carbon arc lamps