Gallium was discovered by the French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1875. He identified it using spectroscopy from its characteristic violet spectral lines in a sample of zinc ore (sphalerite). The existence and properties of gallium had been predicted several years earlier in 1871 by Dmitri Mendeleev, who called it "eka-aluminium" in his periodic table. Lecoq de Boisbaudran named the element "gallia" after the Latin name for France, Gallia, his native land.
