I’m sure there’s a highly technical way of doing this today, but how did chemists in the 18th century know that what they had produced was a pure and uknown chemical element, and not just another chemical compound?
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If you can’t split it into components with any known method and if you can reproduce its properties with different samples there is a decent chance it’s an element. That process is not without issues and has produced some “elements” that were later shown to be a mixture of more than one element (e.g. “columbium”, later split into niobium and tantalum).
Many elements also follow predictable patterns, so if you have something that fits in a gap it’s more likely to be an element instead of a compound.
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