Johan Gottlieb Gahn, a Swedish chemist and metallurgist, first isolated manganese as a pure metal in 1774 by heating its ore with charcoal. But the story of manganese’s discovery is not a single moment with a single hero. Gahn’s colleague Carl Wilhelm Scheele had already identified manganese dioxide as containing a new, undiscovered element, and the mineral itself had been used by humans for tens of thousands of years before anyone understood what it was.
Tens of Thousands of Years Before Chemistry
Long before anyone thought of manganese as an element, people were using it. The black mineral we now call pyrolusite, which is mostly manganese dioxide, turns up at prehistoric sites across Europe and Africa. Ancient Egyptians and Romans added it to glass to counteract the greenish tint caused by iron impurities, a trick glassmakers still understand today. But the use of manganese compounds goes back far further than any civilization.
Archaeological evidence from several Mousterian-era sites in France shows that Neanderthals were deliberately collecting small black blocks of manganese dioxide. For a long time, researchers assumed these were gathered for body decoration or pigment, similar to how ochre was used. But compositional analysis and combustion experiments have challenged that interpretation. Manganese dioxide turns out to lower the temperature at which wood spontaneously ignites and speeds up the rate at which charcoal burns. The most practical explanation is that Neanderthals were selecting manganese dioxide specifically to help start fires, not to paint themselves.1Europe PMC. Selection and Use of Manganese Dioxide by Neanderthals
That finding reshapes how we think about early human technology, but it also tells us something about manganese itself: it is abundant, easy to find on the surface in many parts of the world, and has striking physical properties that make it useful even to someone with no concept of chemistry. It was hiding in plain sight for a very long time.
How Scheele Identified It and Gahn Isolated It
By the mid-eighteenth century, European chemists and mineralogists knew pyrolusite well. It was a commercially important mineral, used in glassmaking and in the production of chlorine-based bleach. But there was genuine confusion about what it was made of. Many assumed it was an iron compound, since it was dark and heavy. Others grouped it vaguely with other “earths” and metallic calces, the catch-all categories of the era.
Carl Wilhelm Scheele, one of the most productive chemists of his generation, began studying pyrolusite in the early 1770s. Through a series of careful experiments, he demonstrated that pyrolusite was not simply an iron ore but contained a previously unknown metallic substance. He described its chemical behavior in detail, noting how it reacted differently from iron and other known metals when treated with acids. Scheele published his findings and argued that the mineral contained a distinct metal, but he was unable to reduce it to its pure metallic form in his own laboratory. The temperatures and conditions he could achieve were not quite sufficient.
That final step fell to his friend and colleague Johan Gottlieb Gahn. In 1774, Gahn succeeded in isolating the metal by mixing crushed pyrolusite with charcoal and heating the mixture to extreme temperatures in a crucible. The carbon pulled oxygen away from the manganese dioxide, leaving behind a bead of grayish-white metal. It was brittle, hard, and looked nothing like iron.2Nature. The Resources and Applications of Manganese The method was simple in principle but required both the right materials and the confidence to push for higher temperatures than previous attempts had managed.
Credit for the discovery typically goes to both men. Scheele identified manganese as a new element and characterized its chemistry; Gahn proved it by producing the metal itself. In the conventions of eighteenth-century chemistry, isolating the metal was the decisive proof, so Gahn often gets top billing. But without Scheele’s analytical work pointing the way, Gahn would not have known what he was looking for.
Why the Name “Manganese”
The element’s name has a convoluted history that has confused students of chemistry for centuries. It traces back to the Latin word “magnes,” which referred both to the lodestone (a naturally magnetic iron ore) and to the black mineral from the Magnesia region of ancient Greece. Because pyrolusite and magnetite were both dark, heavy minerals found in similar geological settings, they were frequently conflated. The confusion persisted so long that it eventually gave rise to two separate element names from the same root: magnesium and manganese.
In medieval Latin, the black mineral became “manganesum” or “manganesium,” which eventually shortened to manganese in French, English, and German. The Swedish name Scheele used, “braunsten” (brownstone), reflected the mineral’s everyday appearance rather than its classical etymology. When the element was formally named in the new chemical nomenclature of the late eighteenth century, “manganese” stuck. It is one of those cases where the name tells you more about the history of mineralogical confusion than about the element’s actual properties.
Manganese’s Role in the Steel Revolution
For about eighty years after Gahn isolated it, manganese was a laboratory curiosity with limited practical use. That changed dramatically in the mid-nineteenth century when metallurgists discovered that adding small amounts of manganese to iron during steelmaking transformed the final product. Manganese acts as a scavenger, pulling sulfur and oxygen out of molten iron and preventing the brittleness that plagued early steel production. It also increases hardness and wear resistance in the finished alloy.
Robert Mushet’s experiments in the 1850s and 1860s showed that adding a manganese-iron alloy (ferromanganese) during the Bessemer process produced far more reliable and consistent steel. By the 1870s, manganese had become indispensable to the steel industry. Today, steelmaking still consumes the vast majority of all mined manganese, and no commercially viable substitute has been found for its deoxidizing and desulfurizing role. If you look at any structural steel beam, bridge cable, or rail track, manganese is part of what holds it together.
The First Reports of Manganese Poisoning
The industrial expansion that made manganese so valuable also created the first recognized cases of manganese toxicity. In 1837, a Scottish physician named John Couper published a report describing severe neurological damage in workers at the Charles Tennant bleach factory near Glasgow. The factory used manganese dioxide in a then-new process for generating chlorine, and the workers who handled the raw ore in enclosed, poorly ventilated spaces developed tremors, muscle weakness, and difficulty walking. Couper clearly linked the illness to manganese exposure, making this the first documented account of what would later be called manganism.3PubMed. The early history of manganese and the recognition of its neurotoxicity, 1837-1936
Manganism resembles Parkinson’s disease in many of its outward symptoms, including stiffness, tremor, and a shuffling gait, but it affects somewhat different brain structures and does not respond well to the medications used for Parkinson’s. The condition was initially seen almost exclusively in miners and industrial workers who inhaled manganese dust over months or years. Over the following century, additional outbreaks were reported in manganese mines across Europe, North Africa, and South America, gradually building a clinical picture of the disease.
What makes Couper’s 1837 report remarkable is how early it came. Occupational toxicology barely existed as a discipline, and the idea that a specific metal could selectively damage the nervous system was ahead of its time. His observations were largely ignored for decades before the medical community caught up. Today manganese exposure limits in workplaces are tightly regulated, but chronic low-level exposure through contaminated groundwater remains a health concern in some parts of the world.
Manganese on the Ocean Floor
In 1873, during the famous HMS Challenger expedition, scientists dredging the deep ocean floor pulled up strange dark lumps that turned out to be rich in manganese and iron. These ferromanganese nodules, as they came to be called, were the first evidence that manganese accumulates in vast quantities on the seabed. For a full century after that discovery, the Challenger expedition was universally credited as the first to find them.4Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers. On the discovery of ferromanganese nodules in the World Ocean
The nodules form incredibly slowly, growing by just a few millimeters every million years as dissolved manganese and other metals precipitate out of seawater and accrete around a small nucleus like a shark tooth or a grain of sand. They carpet enormous stretches of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean floors. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the central Pacific alone is estimated to contain billions of tons of them. Because the nodules are also rich in nickel, cobalt, and copper, they have attracted serious commercial interest as a potential source of metals for batteries and electronics. Deep-sea mining of these nodules is one of the most contentious environmental issues in ocean policy today, with extraction trials already underway but fierce debate about the ecological cost of disturbing ecosystems that have remained undisturbed for millions of years.
Recognizing Manganese as Biologically Essential
For most of the nineteenth century, manganese was treated as a purely industrial substance with no role in living organisms. That view shifted in the early twentieth century, partly through the work of the French scientist Gabriel Bertrand. Around 1912, Bertrand established mathematical dose-response curves for trace elements, demonstrating that organisms need tiny amounts of certain metals to function but are harmed by larger doses.5The Journal of Nutrition. A Perspective on Mineral Standards His work helped create the conceptual framework for understanding essential trace minerals, of which manganese is one.
We now know that manganese is required by virtually all living things. In humans, it serves as a cofactor for enzymes involved in bone formation, blood clotting, and the metabolism of amino acids and carbohydrates. The amounts needed are small, on the order of a few milligrams per day, and deficiency is rare in people who eat a varied diet because manganese is widespread in nuts, whole grains, leafy greens, and tea. The body tightly regulates how much it absorbs and excretes, which is one reason dietary deficiency is uncommon even without supplementation.
In plants, manganese plays a role that is arguably even more important. It is essential to the oxygen-evolving complex in photosystem II, the molecular machinery that splits water during photosynthesis and releases the oxygen we breathe. Without manganese atoms sitting at the heart of that enzyme cluster, oxygenic photosynthesis as we know it would not work. This biological role connects to an even deeper geological story.
Manganese in Earth’s Geological Record
Some of the largest manganese ore deposits on Earth formed not through ordinary geological processes but as a direct consequence of changes in the planet’s atmosphere. The Kalahari Manganese Field in South Africa, part of the Transvaal Supergroup, contains roughly three-quarters of the world’s known land-based manganese reserves. These deposits formed approximately 2.4 billion years ago, during the period when Earth’s atmosphere was first accumulating significant free oxygen. Dissolved manganese in seawater was oxidized and precipitated onto the continental shelf as the ocean chemistry shifted in response to rising oxygen levels.6Earth-Science Reviews. Sedimentary manganese metallogenesis in response to the evolution of the Earth system
In other words, the massive manganese deposits that supply today’s steel mills were laid down as a direct byproduct of the Great Oxidation Event, the same transition that made complex animal life possible billions of years later. Manganese’s sensitivity to oxidation and reduction reactions means that its deposits serve as a kind of chemical record of ancient ocean and atmospheric conditions. Geologists studying the distribution and age of manganese-rich sedimentary layers use them to reconstruct when and where oxygen levels rose and fell throughout Earth’s history. Each major manganese deposit corresponds to a moment when ocean chemistry crossed a threshold, making manganese one of the more useful geological storytellers among the elements.
Manganese’s Growing Role in Battery Technology
If the nineteenth century was manganese’s steel era, the twenty-first century may become its battery era. Manganese is already a key component of several lithium-ion battery chemistries used in electric vehicles and grid storage. The most common formulations include lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) cathodes, where manganese helps stabilize the crystal structure and improve thermal safety compared to cobalt-heavy alternatives. Because cobalt is expensive and concentrated in politically unstable supply chains, battery manufacturers have been actively working to increase the manganese fraction in their cathode designs.
Lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) is another emerging chemistry that substitutes manganese for some of the iron in the widely used lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, boosting energy density while keeping costs down. Manganese is far more abundant and geographically dispersed than cobalt or nickel, which makes it attractive from a supply-chain perspective. The irony is that a metal first isolated as a laboratory curiosity by a Swedish chemist in 1774 is now positioned as a strategic mineral for the global energy transition. Whether that demand will be met from conventional mines, from recycling, or eventually from the deep-sea nodules that the Challenger first dredged up in 1873 is one of the open industrial questions of the coming decades.