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
Group 3 element concentrated sources of this element, the latter containing up to 45% of scandium in the form of scandium(III) oxide. Yttrium has the same trend in occurrence places; it is found in lunar rock samples collected during the American Apollo Project in a relatively high content as well. The principal commercially viable ore of lutetium is the rare-earth phosphate mineral monazite, (Ce,La,etc.)PO, which contains 0.003% of the element. The main mining areas are China, United States, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka and Australia. Pure lutetium metal is one of the rarest and most expensive of the rare-earth metals with the price about