My Science School

The first super-heavy element to be discovered was rutherfordium. This element may have been first synthesized in 1964 by a team of scientists at Dubna, Russia, led by Georgy Flerov. But this discovery was not universally accepted. So, they carried out the synthesis again at Dubna in 1966, which confirmed the1964 results.

Later, a team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley led by Albert Ghiorso successfully synthesized rutherfordium by bombarding a californium target with carbon-12 and carbon-13 ions.

In 1992, the IUPAC decided that scientists from both Berkeley and Dubna should share the credit of the discovery and ruled that the element would be called rutherfordium. 

Similarly, the credit for the discovery of dubnium is shared between the scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia, and the scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California.

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In 1966, the researchers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, synthesized nobelium for the first time. The element was named after Alfred Nobel.

Element 102 was proposed to be named as nobelium in 1957 by scientists from the Nobel Institute of Physics in Sweden, who thought they had produced it. But they had not made nobelium. Later, in 1958, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley claimed that they had made the element, but IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) ruled that the discovery was most likely to have been made in Dubna in 1966. Since nobelium is produced in small quantities only, it is mostly used for scientific research.

Lawrencium was synthesized by Albert Ghiorso, Torbjørn Sikkeland, Almon Larsh, and Robert Latimer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California in 1961. It gets its name after Ernest Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron particle accelerator.

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Berkelium was named after the city of its origin, Berkeley, California. It was first produced at the University of California, Berkeley by Stanley G. Thompson, Glenn T. Seaborg, Kenneth Street Jr., and Albert Ghiorso in 1949.

A number of alloys and compounds of berkelium have been prepared and studied so far. Since it is artificially produced in small amounts only, berkelium is mainly used in basic scientific research.

Californium was first produced by Stanley Thompson, Kenneth Street, Albert Ghiorso and Glenn Seaborg in 1950. They were based in California, U.S.A. The element was isolated for the first time in large quantities by Burris Cunningham and Stanley Thompson in 1958 at the Materials Testing Reactor in Arco, Idaho. The process involved prolonged (five years) neutron irradiation of plutonium-239. The element was named after the U.S. State of California and the University of California.

The isotope californium-252 (with a half-life of 2.645 years) is produced in nuclear reactors. This isotope has a number of uses. It is used as a neutron emitter, which produces neutrons for beginning nuclear reactions.

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Einsteinium-253, an isotope of einsteinium, was identified by a team of scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Argonne National Laboratory, and the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in 1952. This project was led by Albert Ghiorso.

The discovery of einsteinium was quite unexpected. It was identified after the first thermonuclear explosion which took place in the Pacific on October 31, 1952. Fall-out material gathered from a neighbouring atoll was sent to Berkeley, California for analysis. Within a month they had discovered and identified 200 atoms of a new element einsteinium. It was named after Albert Einstein.

Fermium was also discovered unexpectedly when this debris was further analyzed. But these results were not published until 1955. This element was named after Enrico Fermi, a nuclear physicist.

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The element uranium was discovered in 1789 by Martin Heinrich Klaproth. He obtained it from the mineral pitchblende. It was named after the planet Uranus, which was then recently discovered. Uranium metal was isolated in 1841 by the French chemist Eugene-Melchior Peligot.

Neptunium was first produced in the year 1940 by Edwin McMillan and Philip H. Abelson at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. It is named after the planet Neptune.

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Americium was discovered by Glenn Seaborg, Albert Ghiorso, Ralph James, and Tom Morgan. The element was chemically identified at the metallurgical laboratory at the University of Chicago. It is a synthetic element created during nuclear reactions of heavy elements. Americium is highly radioactive and can be dangerous when handled incorrectly; it can cause severe illnesses.

Curium was first referred to as ‘delirium’ because of the difficulties faced by the scientists in trying to isolate it from americium. In 1952, W. W. Crane, J. C. Wallmann, and Burris B. Cunningham prepared curium in metallic form for the first time at Berkeley, California. The element is named after Marie and Pierre Curie.

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The element thorium was discovered by Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1828. He received a sample of an unusual black mineral. This mineral contained a large number of elements and it also had another substance that Berzelius could not identify, which eventually led to the discovery of thorium.

After some analysis, he concluded that the mineral contained a new element and he called the black mineral thorite, as a tribute to the Scandinavian god Thor. Later, he confirmed that thorite was an oxide of a new element, which he named thorium.

Thorium was discovered to be radioactive by Gerhard Schmidt in 1898. After uranium, it was the first element to be identified as such. The most important discovery about thorium took place in the early 1900s when Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy found that the element decayed into other elements at a fixed rate. It was a key discovery in our understanding of the radioactive elements.

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Radon, atomic number 86, was discovered as radon gas in 1900 by Fredrich E. Dorn in Halle, Germany. He called it radium emanation as the gas came from the element radium, which he was working with. Sir William Ramsay and Robert Gray isolated the gas and named it niton in the year 1908. The element has been called radon since 1923. This name is in honour of radium, which is one of its sources. Radon is one of the earliest discovered radioactive elements. It was identified after uranium, thorium, polonium and radium.

Radon is highly radioactive and causes cancer.

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Actinium is a radioactive element. It was discovered by Andre Debierne in 1899 in Paris. He worked with Marie Curie and discovered actinium in pitchblende (a uranium ore). It was the same ore from which radium and polonium had already been extracted. He was able to identify this new element because the kind of radioactive emissions from his sample was not explainable by the presence of any known element. Although Debierne was able to discover the element, he was unable to isolate pure actinium. The high radioactivity level of actinium makes it very useful in producing neutrons.

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In Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of the year 1869, there was a space directly under iodine. The name for the element to fill this space was called ‘eka-iodine’ and the scientists began searching for the element that would fill up this space. But even 71 years later, this element could not be discovered in nature and was instead synthesized in the earliest particle accelerator.

Astatine was first produced by Dale R. Coson, Kenneth Ross Mackenzie, and Emilio Segrè at the University of California, Berkeley in 1940. Segrè, who was working with Carlo Perrier, had synthesized technetium in the year 1937. Researchers had found that the isotope they had created was radioactive, so they named this element based on the Greek term ‘astatos’ which means unstable.

Traces of astatine appear in uranium and thorium minerals as a decay product naturally. The element is highly radioactive. Astatine is the rarest naturally occurring element and at any given time, there are only about 25 grams of naturally occurring astatine on our planet.

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In the year 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie made their first elemental discovery and that was polonium. They discovered polonium and then radium in the same year in Paris while studying the radioactivity in pitchblende (uranium oxide). Polonium is named after Poland, where Marie Curie was born and raised.

The Curies were not aware of the dangers of working with radioactive elements when they made their discoveries. Polonium is harmful because of its chemical toxicity and radioactivity. Exposure to polonium puts people at the risk of getting various cancers.

Radium was discovered in 1898 by the Curies. To extract 1 gram of radium, about eight tons of pitchblende which has up to 50 percent uranium is needed. The element radium gets its name from the Latin word ‘radius’ which means ray. This is based on the rays emitted by this radioactive element. Metallic radium was first isolated by Marie Curie and Andre Debierne in 1910 by the electrolysis of pure radium chloride solution.

Radium is highly radioactive and causes cancer.

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