Manganese is a hard, brittle, silvery metal often found in industrial iron alloys.
Core Principles & Analysis
Carl Wilhelm Scheele identified manganese as an element and his colleague Johan Gottlieb Gahn isolated the metal in 1774 by reducing pyrolusite with carbon.
The brittle gray metal is essential to life: a manganese-calcium-oxygen cluster in photosystem II performs the water-splitting step of photosynthesis, and manganese dioxide pigments appear in Paleolithic cave paintings.
Around 90% of manganese output goes into steelmaking, where it removes sulfur and hardens the alloy, and manganese dioxide serves as the cathode material in alkaline batteries.