Johan august arfwedson biography of alberta

Johan August Arfwedson (12 January 1792 – 28 October 1841) was a Swedishchemist who discovered the chemical elementlithium in 1817 by isolating it as a salt.

Life and work

Arfwedson belonged to a wealthy bourgeois family, the son of the wholesale merchant and factory owner Jacob Arfwedson and his spouse, Anna Elisabeth Holtermann. The younger Arfwedson matriculated as a student at the University of Uppsala in 1803 (at the time, matriculating at a young age was common for aristocratic and wealthy students), completed a degree in Law in 1809 and a second degree in mineralogy in 1812.

In the latter year, he received an unpaid positio