Manganese

People have been using manganese for thousands of years, even if they didn’t always know that they were! The cave paintings at Lascaux, some of the oldest known works of art, were created in part with manganese dioxide pigments. In Ancient Egypt, glassblowers discovered that adding manganese to glass, which was naturally greenish, would make the glass transparent.

In the late 1700s, a group of Swedish chemists led by Torbern Bergman became convinced that manganese was an element separate from magnesium. Johan Gahn purified manganese for the first time in 1774, proving that manganese was indeed its own element.

On its own, manganese metal is brittle and looks a lot like iron. There are four allotropes, or forms, of manganese, all of which are metallic. The qualities of these allotropes vary, but one form is flexible, soft, and easily cut.

Today, over 90 percent of manganese produced worldwide is used to make steel. The earliest steels had impurities that made them brittle and hard to work with. However, British industrialist Robert Forester Mushet discovered that by adding manganese to molten iron, the steel became much more malleable and easier to work with. Manganese steel, which contains even more manganese than ordinary steel, is extremely strong. It’s used for things like railway tracks, rifle barrels, and mining equipment.

Soda cans are made of aluminum alloyed with manganese to make the metal corrosion resistant. Alkaline batteries also use manganese, and manganese compounds are mixed into fertilizers. Manganese is an essential nutrient. Much as the element makes steel stronger, manganese also makes for strong bones! That's why manganese is often mixed into livestock feed.

Manganese forms many compounds. Manganese oxide, sulfate, and gluconate are used in fertilizers. Manganese dioxide is used in certain kinds of batteries, paints, fireworks, and porcelain.

A variety of manganese compounds are used to give glass different colors.

Potassium permanganate can be an oxidizing agent and has been used as a preservative for flowers and fruits. The next time you give someone a bouquet of roses, consider giving them a little potassium permanganate, too!

Manganese-55 is a stable (non-radioactive) isotope found in nature. Manganese-53 is also found in nature, but because it is radioactive, it’s quite rare, making it useful in radioactive dating (which involves using isotopes to tell how old something is).

Several radioactive manganese isotopes have been created in laboratories. The longest-lived, manganese-53, has a half-life of 3.7 million years. The shortest-lived isotopes have half-lives of less, or much less, than one minute.

Manganese minerals are found all over the world, with pyrolusite and rhodochrosite being the most common. South Africa is the largest producer of manganese ores, followed by China, Australia, and the Gabonese Republic.