A soft, silvery-white metallic chemical element with the symbol Tm and atomic number 69, the least abundant of the rare earth elements.
Named after Thule, the ancient Greek and Roman name for a distant northern location, possibly Scandinavia or Iceland. Swedish chemist Per Teodor Cleve discovered and named the element in 1879. The name reflects the tradition of naming rare earth elements after mythological or geographical locations.
Thulium is the second rarest naturally occurring lanthanide after promethium, and it's so expensive that it has almost no commercial applications - making it one of the most 'useless' elements on the periodic table! The ancient 'Thule' it's named after was considered the edge of the known world.
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