History of zirconium
The zirconium minerals have been around foe a long time, and they have been known most as their old names. Those names are jargon, jacinth, and hyacinth. Jacnith, for example, is mentioned three times in the Bible. No one ever expected that these unique minerals contained an undiscovered element. That was only before Martin Henrich Klaproth who lived between 1742 and 1817. Martin Heinrich Klaproth, a German chemist, isolated the oxide of zirconium from zircon in 1789. Metallic zirconium was first prepared in 1824 by Jons J. Berzelius, a Swedish chemist.
"Good" science is basically a matter of knowing exactly what too look for and how to actually go about looking for it. Many experiments fail at one of those two points. Kalproth's success at identifying zirconium as new element followed directly behind researcher's reports who had failed at the same effort.
Some people said that jargon consisted mostly of silica with slight traces of magnesia, lime, and iron. Silica is better known as silicon dioxide, and magnesium is magnesium oxide. Both are a part of the more abundant compounds in the earth's crust.
Another researcher, hiring his students to do his experiments, came a little closer to the true analysis of jargon : 25% silican, 40% alumina, 13% iron oxide, and 20% lime. Alumina is now known as aluminum oxide, like silica alumina is one of the more abundant compounds on earth.
Knowing what to look for and knowing exactly how to go about it, Herr Kaproth ran his own analysis on the exact same specimen the students had used. In the year of 1789, he announced the results of his work: 25% silica, 5% iron oxide, and 70% zirconia. The students had reached the silica analysis correctly, but unfortunately y they had confused alumina and lime with Klaproths new element, zirconia, which is now known as zirconium.
A few of these facts came from the excellent book...
Heiserman, David L. Exploring Chemical Elements and Their Compounds. New York NY: Division of McGraw Hill., 1992.