History

Indium was discovered by Ferdinand Reich and Theodor Richter in 1863. Reich was not looking to discover this new element; he had been searching for a recently discovered element. He was trying to experiment on this recently discovered element, mined from zinc ore. Reich and Richter set up this zinc ore under a spectrographscope and found a new element like Reich had predicted from other experiments he had done. They also isolated the metal after they had discovered it. Before 1924, there was only about one gram in the world of indium in it's isolated form. Indium is about as hard to come across as silver.