The race to find all the elements started as a fun pass-time for scientists who had the appropriate funds. Soon, during the Cold War, a rivalry came about between American and Soviet scientists to leave their marks upon the periodic table. The University of California at Berkley named elements 97 and 98 (which they had found in their labs) berkelium and californium. The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section joked around that the university would, no doubt, find plenty of other elements after these and lost the chance to be immortalized on the table with a sequence like universitium (97), ofium (98), californium (99), berkelium (100). Berkley scientists joked back, saying how awful it would've been if some Yankee scientist discovered elements 99 and 100 before them and decided to name them "newium" and "yorkium".
One scientist from Berkley, Glenn Seaborg, stepped in when his colleague, Edwin McMillan, was whisked away from his studies by the U.S. government to work on radar and other advances during World War II. Seaborg took on McMillan's work and made element 94. It's charge is +7, higher than any other element out there. It was believed that this was the last element that could be made. Because of this, Seaborg named it plutonium. He worked in finding elements 95 and 96, which he named americium and curium, the latter after Marie Curie. He also found elements 99 and 100 (einsteinium and fermium) in radioactive coral after a hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific atolls in 1952. They continued on to find elements 101, 102, and 103 as well.
During this time, Soviet science was at a standstill. Their scientists were sent to Siberia to mine for nickel and other minerals that were abundant in the -80 degree mines. Hearing word of America's successes, a few went back to their labs to contest with the American chemists. They managed to steal some of America's splendor by finding element 104. Things got so tense, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) had to intervene in the naming of the next elements from 104 too 109: rutherfordium (104), dubnium (105), seaborgium (106), bohrium (107), hassium (108), and meitnerium (109). Element 106 caused some fuss, since Americans downright refused to have it named anything other than seaborgium, the only element to be named after a living person. They practically forced the IUPAC to allow it to be named that since they were backed by one of the major scientific-journal publishing companies. That was a small victory, though, because Russia still has the glory for finding all the elements after that.
I didn't know that scientist fought over name rights of element. I actually found that quite humorous in all fairness. Additionally it never came to my attention at how much of a scientific player Russia was.
ReplyDeleteNewium and Yorkium, hmm they have a nice ring to them :). Just kidding, but seriously everyone wanted to find elements? The Cold War must have been a tough battle between America and Russia.
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