Palladium Palladium Palladium is a chemical element with symbol Pd and atomic number 46. It is a rare and lustrous silvery-white metal discovered in 1803 by William Hyde Wollaston. He named it after the asteroid Pallas, which was itself named after the epithet of the Greek goddess Athena, acquired by her when she slew Pallas. Palladium, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium form a group of elements referred to as the platinum group metals (PGMs). These have similar chemical properties, but palladium has the lowest melting point and is the least dense of them. More than half the supply of palladium
Period 3 element by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who called it "dephlogisticated muriatic acid air," having thought he synthesized the oxide obtained from the hydrochloric acid, because acids were thought at the time to necessarily contain oxygen, a number of chemists, including Claude Berthollet, suggested that Scheele's dephlogisticated muriatic acid air must be a combination of oxygen and the yet undiscovered element, and Scheele named the supposed new element within this oxide as "muriaticum." The suggestion that this newly discovered gas was a simple element was made in 1809 by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis-Jacques. This was confirmed by Sir Humphry Davy