Symbol: Ta (you’re welcome)
Atomic number: 73, making it the Sandi Toksvig of the elemental world - ask an older sibling.
Overview: You use Tantalum every day. Not directly, of course. However, if you own a DVD player, a mobile phone and/or a computer, you're reaping the benefits of man having tamed Tantalum in 1802.
Discovered: In the aforementioned year by the deaf Swedish chemist Anders Ekeberg.
What it looks like: In a world rich in soft, dull, silvery-grey metals, Tantalum is exotic indeed, being a hard, lustrous blue-grey metal.
What it does: Refuses to corrode when exposed to acid which is the reason it's so incredibly useful.
What it's used for: Fashioning such electrical components as capacitors and resistors. Tantalum's also very handy when it comes to creating the alloys used in the manufacture of jet engine and nuclear power plant components.
You might not know this but: Tantalum is named after Tantalus, the figure from Greek mythology who was doomed to live his life surrounded by fruit and spring water, neither of which was quite within his reach. Asked why he had chosen the moniker, Anders Ekeberg explained, "This metal I call Tantalum... partly in allusion to its incapacity, when immersed in acid, to absorb any [acid] and be saturated." He then added that his favourite colour was blue.