Why Was Strontium Titanate Invented Before It Was Discovered
An important component in precision optics and ceramics, strontium titanate is a particularly versatile material used in a wide range of manufacturing processes.
One of strontium titanate’s most common uses was as a synthetic diamond under the name Fabulite, both for its particularly vivid prismatic fire and for its precision qualities for use in diamond coating and laser focusing.
It also has an exceptionally unusual quality for crystal minerals of its type, in that it was invented, patented and synthesised in a laboratory decades before it was discovered to be a real mineral.
The process of growing strontium titanate was first patented in 1953 and further perfected over the next four years as it became the most well-used synthetic diamond on the market until it was superseded by yttrium aluminium garnet, gadolinium gallium garnet and finally cubic zirconia.
Despite this, it is still used for many purposes to this day, and it was not until five years after the latter was mass-produced that strontium titanate was discovered as a naturally occurring mineral.
In the Aldan Shield, part of Eastern Siberia in Russia (then part of the Soviet Union) a naturally occurring form of strontium titanate was discovered and subsequently named tausonite after Lev Vladimirovich Tauson.
Whilst Mr Tauson was largely unrelated to either the synthesis of strontium titanate in the 1950s or the discovery of its natural version in the 1980s, he was a leading figure in geochemistry, particularly in what was then the USSR.
Mr Tauson was the head of the Siberian Division of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, particularly focused on geochemistry as it pertains to rare materials.
Interestingly, Mr Tauson was more focused on magma ore, abyssal fractures and igneous rocks, of which the mineral that bears his name is none of the above.
However, his general work in bringing forward Irkutsk and Siberia as major hubs of Russian geochemistry made him a candidate to have a mineral named after him, and one first discovered in the region before being found in Paraguay and Japan is appropriate.
