| He discovered
tellurium
in 1782. |
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| He was born on the July 1, 1740 Nagyszeben (now, Sibiu) Transylvania, or 4 October 1742 in Poysdorf, (Lower Austria), and died on the October 12, 1825 in Vienna. |
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| He studied philosophy in Vienna but became a specialist in mineralogy. |
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| In 1778 he discovered an occurrence of Tourmaline in the Zillertal. |
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| In 1782 or 1783, as the main overseer of mines in Romania, he analyzed a bluish gold ore from Transylvania known as 'German Gold'. He extracted a metal believing it to be antimony. Soon he verified that it was an unknown chemical element, however did not continue the research in relation to this new element. |
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| In 1798, the German chemist
Martin Heinrich Klaproth
isolated the new element and it called it
Tellurium
, but gave the credit of the discovery to the Franz-Joseph. |
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