Bohuslav Brauner

Bohuslav Brauner (8 May 1855 – 15 February 1935) was a Czech chemist. He worked at the University of Prague, where he investigated the properties of the rare earth elements, especially the determination of their atomic weights. Brauner predicted the existence of the rare earth element promethium ten years before the existence of the gap was confirmed experimentally (although the element was still undiscovered). In the 1880s, when he already had started lecturing in Prague, he still competed internationally in cycling races.

Career Brauner was a student of Robert Bunsen at the University of Heidelberg and later of Henry Roscoe at the University of Manchester. Brauner became lecturer for chemistry at the Charles University of Prague in 1883, assistant professor as of 1890, and full professor as of 1897. During the course of his career, he corresponded frequently with Dmitri Mendeleev, and they influenced each other as models for periodicity of the elements were developed.

As part of his investigations on the chemistry of the lanthanides, Brauner proposed in 1902 the existence of an element that would be located between neodymium and samarium in the periodic table. Henry Moseley experimentally confirmed Brauner's prediction in 1914, identifying the gap between their nuclear charges. The missing element was eventually synthesized in 1945 and named promethium.

Brauner authored the chapter on rare earth elements in Mendeleev's textbook "Principles of Chemistry". He also wrote the portion on atomic weights in "Handbuch der Anorganischen Chemie", which was a textbook authored principally by Richard Abegg.

Honors Brauner received honorary memberships to the Chemical Society of London, the American Chemical Society and the Societe Chimique de France, and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Manchester. The Recueil des Travaux Chimiques des Pays-Bas honored him in 1925 as did the Collection of Czechoslovak Chemical Communications in 1930.