Friedrich Stromeyer

Friedrich Stromeyer was a German chemist born in Göttingen in 1776, the eldest son of a professor of medicine there, and the discoverer of the element cadmium. He studied chemistry and medicine at Göttingen and Paris under Johann Friedrich Gmelin and Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, received his MD from the University of Göttingen in 1800 and then became a professor at the university, where he also served as an inspector of apothecaries and taught Robert Bunsen. He found cadmium in 1817 while studying zinc carbonate, was the first to recommend starch as a reagent for free iodine, and in 1819 was the first to describe the mineral eudialyte. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1826 and a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of London the following year, and the mineral stromeyerite was named in his honour in 1832. He died in 1835.