| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Actinium |
Ac |
Greek ακτίνα (aktína = beam). Actinium was discovered in 1899 by André-Louis Debierne, a French chemist, who separated it from pitchblende. Friedrich Otto Giesel independently discovered actinium in 1902. The chemical behavior of actinium is similar to that of the rare earth lanthanum. The word actinium comes from the Greek aktis, aktinos, meaning beam or ray. |
| Aluminium |
Al |
Friedrich Wöhler is generally credited with isolating aluminium (Latin alumen, alum) in 1827 by mixing anhydrous aluminium chloride with potassium. |
| Americium |
Am |
Americium was first synthesized by Glenn T. Seaborg, Leon O. Morgan, Ralph A. James, and Albert Ghiorso in late 1944 at the wartime Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago (now known as Argonne National Laboratory). Seaborg was granted patent 3,156,523 for "Element 95 and Method of Producing Said Element". The discovery of americium and curium was first announced informally on a children's quiz show in 1945. |
| Antimony |
Sb |
Antimony was recognized in antiquity (3000 BC or earlier) in various compounds, and it was prized for its fine casting qualities. It was first reported scientifically by Tholden in 1450, and was known to be a metal by the beginning of the 17th century. The origin of the name "antimony" is not clear; the term may come from the Greek words "anti" and "monos", which approximately means "opposed to solitude" as it was thought never to exist in its pure form, or from the Pharaonic (Ancient Egypt) expression "Antos Ammon", which could be translated as "bloom of the god Ammon". |
| Argon |
Ar |
Greek αργό(ν) argon. Argon (Greek argos meaning "inactive") was suspected to be present in air by Henry Cavendish in 1785 but was not discovered until 1894 by Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Ramsay. |
| Arsenic |
As |
The word arsenic is borrowed from the Persian word زرنيخ Zarnik meaning "yellow orpiment". Zarnik was borrowed by Greek as arsenikon. Arsenic has been known and used in Persia and elsewhere since ancient times. As the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were somewhat ill-defined, it was frequently used for murder until the advent of the Marsh test, a sensitive chemical test for its presence. |
| Astatine |
At |
Greek αστατεω (asteo = unstable). Astatine (Greek astatos meaning "unstable") was first synthesized in 1940 by Dale R. Corson, K. R. MacKenzie, and Emilio Segrè of the University of California, Berkeley by barraging bismuth with alpha particles. An earlier name for the element was alabamine (Ab). |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Barium |
Ba |
Greek βαρυς(barus = heavy). Barium (Greek "barys" meaning "heavy") was first identified in 1774 by Carl Scheele and extracted in 1808 by Sir Humphry Davy in England. The oxide was at first called barote, by Guyton de Morveau, which was changed by Antoine Lavoisier to baryta, which soon was modified to "barium" to describe the metal. |
| Berkelium |
Bk |
Berkelium was first synthesized by Glenn T. Seaborg, Albert Ghiorso, Stanley G. Thompson, and Kenneth Street, Jr at the University of California, Berkeley in December 1949. |
| Beryllium |
Be |
The name beryllium comes from the Greek beryllos, beryl. At one time beryllium was referred to as glucinium (from Greek glykys, sweet), due to the sweet taste of its salts. This element was discovered by Louis Vauquelin in 1798 as the oxide in beryl and in emeralds. |
| Bismuth |
Bi |
Bismuth (New Latin bisemutum from German Wismuth, perhaps from weiße Masse, "white mass") was confused in early times with tin and lead due to its resemblance to those elements. Claude François Geoffroy showed in 1753 that this metal is distinct from lead. |
| Bohrium |
Bh |
Bohrium was synthesized in 1976 by a Soviet team led by Y. Oganessian at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna, who produced isotope 261Bh with a half-life of 1-2 ms (later data give a half life of around 10 ms). In 1981 a German research team led by P. Armbruster and G. Münzenberg at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Institute for Heavy Ion Research) at Darmstadt were also able to confirm the Soviet team's results and produce bohrium, this time the longer-lived Bh-262.
The Germans suggested the name nielsbohrium to honor the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. The Soviets had suggested this name be given to element 105 (dubnium). There was an element naming controversy as to what the elements from 101 to 109 were to be called; thus IUPAC adopted unnilseptium (symbol Uns) as a temporary, systematic element name for this element. In 1994 a committee of IUPAC recommended that element 107 be named bohrium. While this conforms to the names of other elements honoring individuals, where only the surname is taken, it was opposed by many who were concerned that it could be confused with boron. Despite this, the name bohrium for element 107 was recognized internationally in 1997.
|
| Boron |
B |
Compounds of boron (Arabic Buraq from Persian Burah) have been known of for thousands of years. In early Egypt, mummification depended upon an ore known as natron, which contained borates as well as some other common salts. Borax glazes were used in China from 300 AD, and boron compounds were used in glassmaking in ancient Rome. |
| Bromine |
Br |
Greek βρωμος (brómos = stench). Bromine was discovered by Antoine Balard at salt marshes of Montpellier in 1826 but was not produced in quantity until 1860. The French chemist and physicist Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac suggested the name bromine due to the characteristic smell of the vapours. |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Cadmium |
Cd |
Cadmium (Latin cadmia, Greek kadmeia meaning "calamine") was discovered in Germany in 1817 by Friedrich Strohmeyer. Strohmeyer found the new element within an impurity in zinc carbonate (calamine) and for 100 years Germany remained the only important producer of the metal. The metal was named after the Latin word for calamine since the metal was found in this zinc compound. Strohmeyer noted that some impure samples of calamine changed color when heated but pure calamine did not. |
| Caesium |
Cs |
Caesium (Latin caesius meaning "sky blue") was spectroscopically discovered by Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff in 1860 in mineral water from Dürkheim, Germany. Its identification was based upon the bright blue lines in its spectrum and it was the first element discovered by spectrum analysis. The first caesium metal was produced in 1881. Historically, the most important use for caesium has been in research and development, primarily in chemical and electrical applications. |
| Calcium |
Ca |
Calcium (Latin calx, meaning "lime") was known of as early as the first century when the Ancient Romans prepared lime as calcium oxide. It was not actually isolated until 1808 in England when Sir Humphry Davy electrolyzed a mixture of lime and mercuric oxide. |
| Californium |
Cf |
Californium was first synthesized by University of California, Berkeley researchers Stanely Thompson, Kenneth Street, Jr., Albert Ghiorso and Glenn T. Seaborg in 1950. It was the sixth transuranium element to be discovered and the team announced their discovery on March 17, 1950. It was named after the U.S. state of California and for the University of California, Berkeley (which is nicknamed "Cal"). |
| Carbon |
C |
The name comes from French charbone, which in turn came from Latin carbo, meaning charcoal. In German and Dutch, the names for carbon are Kohlenstoff and koolstof respectively, both literally meaning "coal-stuff". |
| Cerium |
Ce |
Cerium was discovered in Sweden by Jöns Jakob Berzelius and Wilhelm von Hisinger, and independently in Germany by Martin Heinrich Klaproth, both in 1803.
Cerium was so named by Berzelius after the asteroid Ceres, discovered two years earlier (1801).
|
| Chlorine |
Cl |
Greek χλωρος (chlorós = yellowish green). Chlorine (Gr. χλωρος, greenish yellow) was discovered in 1774 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who mistakenly thought it contained oxygen. Chlorine was given its name in 1810 by Humphry Davy, who insisted that it was in fact an element. |
| Chromium |
Cr |
Chromium was named based on the Greek word "chroma" meaning color, because of the many colorful compounds made from it. |
| Cobalt |
Co |
The word cobalt comes from the German kobalt or kobold, meaning evil spirit, the metal being so called by miners, because it was poisonous and troublesome (it polluted and degraded the other mined elements, like nickel). Other sources cite the origin as stemming from silver miners' belief that cobalt had been placed by kobolds who had stolen the silver. Some also think the name may derive from Greek kobalos, which means 'mine', and which may have common roots with kobold, goblin, and cobalt. |
| Copper |
Cu |
In Greek times, the metal was known by the name chalkos (χαλκός). Copper was a very important resource for the Romans and Greeks. In Roman times, it became known as aes Cyprium (aes being the generic Latin term for copper alloys such as bronze and other metals, and because so much of it was mined in Cyprus). From this, the phrase was simplified to cuprum and then eventually Anglicized into the English copper. |
| Curium |
Cm |
Curium was first synthesized at the University of California, Berkeley and by Glenn T. Seaborg, Ralph A. James, and Albert Ghiorso in 1944. The team named the new element after Marie Curie and her husband Pierre who are famous for discovering radium and for their work in radioactivity. |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Gadolinium |
Gd |
In 1880, Swiss chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac observed spectroscopic lines due to gadolinium in samples of didymium and gadolinite; French chemist Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran separated gadolinia, the oxide of Gadolinium, from Mosander's yttria in 1886. The element itself was isolated only recently. Gadolinium, like the mineral gadolinite, is named after Finnish chemist and geologist Johan Gadolin. |
| Gallium |
Ga |
Gallium (Latin Gallia meaning Gaul; also gallus, meaning "rooster") was discovered spectroscopically by Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1875 by its characteristic spectrum (two violet lines) in an examination of a zinc blend from the Pyrenees. Before its discovery, most of its properties had been predicted and described by Dmitri Mendeleev (who called the hypothetical element eka-aluminium) on the basis of its position in his periodic table. Later, in 1875, Boisbaudran obtained the free metal through the electrolysis of its hydroxide in KOH solution. He named the element after his native land of France and, in one of those multilingual puns so beloved of men of science of the early 19th century, after himself, as 'Lecoq' = the rooster, and Latin for rooster is "gallus". |
| Germanium |
Ge |
In 1871 germanium (Latin Germania for Germany) was one of the elements that Dmitri Mendeleev predicted to exist as a missing analogue of the silicon group (Mendeleev called it "ekasilicon"). The existence of this element was proven by Clemens Winkler in 1886. This discovery was an important confirmation of Mendeleev's idea of element periodicity. |
| Gold |
Au |
Gold (Sanskrit jval, Greek χρυσος [khrusos], Latin aurum for "shining dawn", Anglo-Saxon gold, Chinese 金 [jīn]) has been known and highly valued since prehistoric times. It may have been the first metal used by humans and was valued for ornamentation and rituals. Egyptian hieroglyphs from as early as 2600 BC describe gold, which king Tushratta of the Mitanni claimed was as "common as dust" in Egypt. Egypt and Nubia had the resources to make them major gold-producing areas for much of history. Gold is also mentioned several times in the Old Testament. |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Hafnium |
Hf |
Hafnium (Latin Hafnia for "Copenhagen") was discovered by Dirk Coster and Georg von Hevesy in 1923 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Soon after, the new element was predicted to be associated with zirconium by using the Bohr theory and was finally found in zircon through X-ray spectroscope analysis in Norway. |
| Hassium |
Hs |
It was first synthesized in 1984 by a German research team led by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg at the Institute for Heavy Ion Research at Darmstadt. The name hassium was proposed by them, derived from the Latin name for the German state of Hessen where the institute is located. There was an element naming controversy as to what the elements from 101 to 109 were to be called; thus IUPAC adopted unniloctium (symbol Uno) as a temporary, systematic element name for this element. In 1994 a committee of IUPAC recommended that element 108 be named hahnium. The name hassium was adopted internationally, however, in 1997. |
| Helium |
He |
Helium was first detected on August 18, 1868 as a bright yellow line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm in the spectrum of the chromosphere of the Sun, by French astronomer Pierre Janssen during a total solar eclipse in India. Janssen was at first ridiculed since no element had ever been detected in space before being found on Earth. October 20th the same year, English astronomer Norman Lockyer also observed the same yellow line in the solar spectrum and concluded that it was caused by an unknown element after unsuccessfully testing to see if it were some new type of hydrogen. Since it was near the Fraunhofer D line he later named the new line D3, distinguishing it from the nearby D1 and D2 double lines of sodium. He and English chemist Edward Frankland named the element after the Greek word for the Sun god, Helios, and, assuming it was a metal, gave it an -ium ending (a mistake that was never corrected). |
| Holmium |
Ho |
Holmium (Holmia, Latin name for Stockholm) was discovered by Marc Delafontaine and Jacques Louis Soret in 1878 who noticed the aberrant spectrographic absorption bands of the then-unknown element (they called it "Element X"). Later in 1878, Per Teodor Cleve independently discovered the element while he was working on erbia earth (erbium oxide). |
| Hydrogen |
H |
Hydrogen was first produced by Theophratus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541)—also known as Paracelsus—by mixing metals with acids. He was unaware that the explosive gas produced by this chemical reaction was hydrogen. In 1671, Robert Boyle described the reaction between two iron fillings and dilute acids, which results in the production of gaseous hydrogen.[1] In 1766, Henry Cavendish was the first to recognize hydrogen as a discrete substance, by identifying the gas from this reaction as "inflammable" and finding that the gas produces water when burned in air. Cavendish stumbled on hydrogen when experimenting with acids and mercury. Although he wrongly assumed that hydrogen was a compound of mercury—and not of the acid—he was still able to accurately describe several key properties of hydrogen. Antoine Lavoisier gave the element its name and proved that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Indium |
In |
Indium (named after the indigo line in its atomic spectrum) was discovered by Ferdinand Reich and Theodor Richter in 1863 while they were testing zinc ores with a spectrograph in search of thallium. |
| Iodine |
I |
Iodine (Gr. iodes meaning violet) was discovered by Barnard Courtois in 1811. He was the son of a manufacturer of saltpeter (potassium nitrate, a vital part of gunpowder). At the time France was at war and gunpowder was in great demand. Saltpeter was isolated from seaweed washed up on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. To isolate the potassium nitrate, seaweed was burned and the ash then washed with water. The remaining waste was destroyed by adding sulfuric acid. One day Courtois added too much sulfuric acid and cloud of purple vapor rose. Courtois noted that the vapor crystallized on cold surfaces making dark crystals. Courtois suspected that this was a new element but lacked the money to pursue his observations. |
| Iridium |
Ir |
Iridium was discovered in 1803 by Smithson Tennant in London, England along with osmium in the dark-colored residue of dissolving crude platinum in aqua regia (a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid). The element was named after the Latin word for rainbow (iris; iridium means "of rainbows") because many of its salts are strongly colored. |
| Iron |
Fe |
The first signs of use of iron come from the Sumerians and the Egyptians, where around 4000 BC, a few items, such as the tips of spears, daggers and ornaments, were being fashioned from iron recovered from meteorites. Because meteorites fall from the sky some linguists have conjectured that the English word iron (OE īsern), which has cognates in many northern and western European languages, derives from the Etruscan aisar which means "the gods". |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Lanthanum |
La |
Lanthanum was discovered in 1839 by Carl Mosander, when he partially decomposed a sample of cerium nitrate by heating and treating the resulting salt with dilute nitric acid. From the resulting solution, he isolated a new rare earth he called lantana. Lanthanum was isolated in relatively pure form in 1923. The word lanthanum comes from the Greek lanthanein, to lie hidden. |
| Lawrencium |
Lr |
The origin of the name, preferred by the American Chemical Society, is in reference to Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron. The symbol Lw was originally used but in 1963 it was changed to Lr. In August 1997 the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) ratified the name lawrencium and symbol Lr during a meeting in Geneva. Unniltrium was sometimes used as a temporary, systematic element name until that time. |
| Lead |
Pb |
Lead has been used by humans for at least 7000 years, because it was (and continues to be) widespread and easy to extract, as well as easy to work with, being both highly malleable and ductile as well as easy to smelt. Lead was mentioned in the Book of Exodus. Alchemists thought that lead was the oldest metal and associated it with the planet Saturn. Lead pipes that bear the insignia of Roman emperors are still in service and many Roman "pigs" (ingots) of lead figure in Derbyshire lead mining history and in the history of the industry in other English centres. Lead's symbol Pb is an abbreviation of its Latin name plumbum. The English word "plumbing" also derives from this Latin root. |
| Lithium |
Li |
The element was not isolated until William Thomas Brande and Sir Humphry Davy later used electrolysis on lithium oxide in 1818. Bunsen and Matiessen isolated larger quantities of the metal by electrolysis of lithium chloride in 1855. Commercial production of lithium metal was achieved in 1923 by the German company Metallgesellschaft through using electrolysis of molten lithium chloride and potassium chloride. It was apparently given the name "lithium" (Greek λιθοσ (lithos), meaning "stone") because it was discovered from a mineral while other common alkali metals were first discovered from plant tissue. |
| Lutetium |
Lu |
Lutetium (Latin Lutetia meaning Paris) was independently discovered in 1907 by French scientist Georges Urbain and Austrian mineralogist Baron Carl Auer von Welsbach. Both men found lutetium as an impurity in the mineral ytterbia which was thought by Swiss chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac (and most others) to consist entirely of the element ytterbium. The separation of lutetium from Marignac's ytterbium was first described by Urbain and the naming honor therefore went to him. He chose the names neoytterbium (new ytterbium) and lutecium for the new element but neoytterbium was eventually reverted back to ytterbium and in 1949 the spelling of element 71 was changed to lutetium. Welsbach proposed the names cassiopium for element 71 (after the constellation Cassiopeia) and albebaranium for the new name of ytterbium but these naming proposals where rejected (although many German scientists still call element 71 cassiopium). |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Magnesium |
Mg |
The name originates from the Greek word for a district in Thessaly called Magnesia.
Joseph Black in England recognized magnesium as being an element in 1755, Sir Humphry Davy electrolytically isolated pure magnesium metal in 1808 from a mix of magnesia and HgO and A. A. B. Bussy prepared it in coherent form in 1831.
|
| Manganese |
Mn |
Manganese (Latin magnes, meaning "magnet") was in use in prehistoric times; paints that were pigmented with manganese dioxide can be traced back 17,000 years. The Egyptians and Romans used manganese compounds in glass-making, to either remove color from glass or add color to it. Manganese can be found in the iron ores used by the Spartans. Some speculate that the exceptional hardness of Spartan steels derives from the inadvertent production of an iron-manganese alloy. |
| Meitnerium |
Mt |
The name meitnerium was suggested in honor of the Austrian-Swedish physicist and mathematician Lise Meitner, but there was an element naming controversy as to what the elements from 101 to 109 were to be called; thus IUPAC adopted unnilennium (symbol Une) as a temporary, systematic element name. However in 1997 they resolved the dispute and adopted the current name. |
| Mendelevium |
Md |
Mendelevium (for Dmitri Mendeleyev, surname commonly spelt as Mendeleev, Mendeléef, or even Mendelejeff, and first name sometimes spelt as Dmitry or Dmitriy) was first synthesized by Albert Ghiorso (team leader), Glenn T. Seaborg, Bernard Harvey, and Greg Choppin in early 1955. |
| Mercury |
Hg |
Mercury was known to the ancient Chinese and Hindus and was found in Egyptian tombs that date from 1500 BCE. In China, India and Tibet, mercury use was thought to prolong life, heal fractures, and maintain generally good health. The ancient Greeks used mercury in ointments and the Romans used it in cosmetics. By 500 BCE mercury was used to make amalgams with other metals. The Indian word for alchemy is Rassayana which means ‘the way of mercury.’ Alchemists often thought of mercury as the first matter from which all metals were formed. Different metals could be produced by varying the quality and quantity of sulfur contained within the mercury. An ability to transform mercury into any metal resulted from the essentially mercurial quality of all metals. The purest of these was gold, and mercury was required for the transmutation of base (or impure) metals into gold. This was a primary goal of alchemy, either for material or spiritual gain. Hg is the modern chemical symbol for mercury. It comes from hydrargyrum, a Latinized form of the Greek word `Υδραργυρος (hydrargyros), which is a compound word meaning 'water' and 'silver' — since it is liquid, like water, and yet has a silvery metallic sheen. The element was named after the Roman god Mercury, known for speed and mobility. It is associated with the planet Mercury. The astrological symbol for the planet is also one of the alchemical symbols for the metal (above left). Mercury is the only metal for which the alchemical planetary name became the common name. |
| Molybdenum |
Mo |
Molybdenum (from the Greek molybdos meaning "lead-like") is not found free in nature, and the compounds that can be found were, until the late 18th century, confused with compounds of other elements, such as carbon or lead. In 1778 Carl Wilhelm Scheele was able to determine that molybdenum was separate from graphite and lead, and isolated the oxide of the metal from molybdenite. |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Neodymium |
Nd |
Neodymium was discovered by Baron Carl Auer von Welsbach, an Austrian chemist, in Vienna in 1885. He separated neodymium, as well as the element praseodymium, from a material known as didymium by means of spectroscopic analysis; however, it was not isolated in relatively pure form until 1925. The name neodymium is derived from the Greek words neos, new, and didymos, twin. |
| Neon |
Ne |
Greek νέος = new). Neon (Greek neos meaning "new") was discovered by English chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers in 1898. |
| Neptunium |
Np |
Neptunium (named for the planet Neptune) was first discovered by Edwin McMillan and Philip Abelson in 1940. Initially predicted by Walter Russell's "spiral" organization of the periodic table, it was found at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley where the team produced the neptunium isotope Np-239 (2.4 day half-life) by bombarding uranium with slow moving neutrons. It was the first transuranium element produced synthetically and the first actinide series transuranium element discovered. |
| Nickel |
Ni |
Nickel use is ancient, and can be traced back as far as 3500 BCE. Bronzes from what is now Syria had a nickel content of up to two percent. Further, there are Chinese manuscripts suggesting that "white copper" (e.g. baitung) was used in the Orient between 1400 and 1700 BC. However, because the ores of nickel were easily mistaken for ores of silver, any understanding of this metal and its use dates to more contemporary times. Minerals containing nickel (e.g. kupfernickel, or false copper) were of value for colouring glass green. In 1751, Baron Axel Frederik Cronstedt was attempting to extract copper from kupfernickel (now called niccolite), and obtained instead a white metal that he called nickel. |
| Niobium |
Nb |
Niobium (Greek mythology: Niobe, daughter of Tantalus) was discovered by Charles Hatchett in 1801. Hatchett found niobium in columbite ore that was sent to England in the 1750s by John Winthrop, the first governor of Connecticut. There was a considerable amount of confusion about the difference between the closely-related niobium and tantalum that wasn't resolved until 1846 by Heinrich Rose and Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac, who rediscovered the element. Since Rose was unaware of Hatchett's work, he gave the element a different name, niobium. In 1864 Christian Blomstrand was the first to prepare the metal. He did this by reducing niobium chloride by heating it in a hydrogen atmosphere. Columbium (symbol Cb) was the name originally given to this element by Hatchett, but the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially adopted "niobium" as the name for element 41 in 1950 after 100 years of controversy. This was a compromise of sorts; the IUPAC accepted tungsten instead of wolfram, in deference to North American usage; and niobium instead of columbium, in deference to European usage. Not everyone agreed, however, and while many leading chemical societies and government organizations refer to it by the official IUPAC name, many leading metallurgists, metal societies, and most leading American commercial producers still refer to the metal by the original "columbium." |
| Nitrogen |
N |
Nitrogen (Latin nitrum, Greek Nitron meaning "native soda", "genes", "forming") is formally considered to have been discovered by Daniel Rutherford in 1772, who called it noxious air or fixed air. That there was a fraction of air that did not support combustion was well known to the late 18th century chemist. Nitrogen was also studied at about the same time by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Henry Cavendish, and Joseph Priestley, who referred to it as burnt air or phlogisticated air. Nitrogen gas was inert enough that Antoine Lavoisier referred to it as azote, which stands for without life; this term has become the French word for "nitrogen" and later spread out to many other languages. |
| Nobelium |
No |
Nobelium (named for Alfred Nobel) was first synthesized by Albert Ghiorso, Glenn T. Seaborg, John R. Walton and Torbjørn Sikkeland in April 1958 at the University of California, Berkeley. The team used the new heavy-ion linear accelerator (HILAC) to bombard a curium target (95% Cm-244 and 4.5% Cm-246) with carbon-12 ions to make nobelium-254 (half-life 55 seconds). Their work was confirmed by Soviet researchers in Dubna. |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Palladium |
Pd |
Palladium was discovered by William Hyde Wollaston in 1803. This element was named by Wollaston in 1804 after the asteroid Pallas, which was discovered two years earlier. |
| Phosphorus |
P |
Phosphorus (Greek phosphoros, meaning "light bearer" which was the ancient name for the planet Venus) was discovered by German alchemist Hennig Brand in 1669 through a preparation from urine. Working in Hamburg, Brand attempted to distill salts by evaporating urine, and in the process produced a white material that glowed in the dark and burned brilliantly. Since that time, phosphorescence has been used to describe substances that shine in the dark without burning. |
| Platinum |
Pt |
The Spaniards named the metal "platina," or little silver, when they first encountered it in Colombia. They regarded platinum as an unwanted impurity in the silver they were mining, and often discarded it. Platinum was discovered by astronomer Antonio de Ulloa and Don Jorge Juan y Santacilia (1713–1773), both appointed by King Philip V to join a geographical expedition in Peru that lasted from 1735 to 1745. Among other things, Ulloa observed the platina del pinto, the unworkable metal found with gold in New Granada (Colombia). British privateers intercepted Ulloa's ship on the return voyage. Though he was well-treated in England, and even made a member of the Royal Society he was prevented from publishing a reference to the unknown metal until 1748. Before that could happen Charles Wood independently isolated the element in 1741. |
| Plutonium |
Pu |
Plutonium was first produced in 1941 by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, McMillan, J. W. Kennedy, and A. C. Wahl by deuteron bombardment of uranium in the 60-inch cyclotron at Berkeley, but the discovery was kept secret. It was named after the planet Pluto, having been discovered directly after neptunium (which itself was one higher on the periodic table than uranium), by analogy with the ordering of the planets in the solar system. During the Manhattan Project, large reactors were set up in Hanford, Washington for the production of plutonium, which was used in two of the first atomic bombs (the first was tested at Trinity site, the second dropped on Nagasaki, Japan). |
| Polonium |
Po |
Also called Radium F, polonium was discovered by Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie in 1898 and was later named after Marie's home land of Poland. Poland at the time was under Russian, Prussian and Austrian domination, and not recognized as an independent country. It was Marie's hope that naming the element after her home land would add notoriety to its plight. Polonium may be the first element named to highlight a political controversy. |
| Potassium |
K |
Potassium was not known in Roman times, and its names are not Classical Latin. The name kalium was taken from the word "alkali", which came from Arabic al qalīy = "the calcined ashes". The name potassium was made from the word "potash", which is English, and originally meant an alkali extracted in a pot from the ash of burnt wood or tree leaves. |
| Praseodymium |
Pr |
The name Praseodymium comes from the Greek prasios, meaning green, and didymos, or twin. In 1841, Mosander extracted the rare earth didymium from lanthana. In 1874, Per Teodor Cleve concluded that didymium was in fact two elements, and in 1879, Lecoq de Boisbaudran isolated a new earth, Samarium, from didymium obtained from the mineral samarskite. In 1885, the Austrian chemist baron Carl Auer von Welsbach separated didymium into two elements, Praseodymium and Neodymium, which gave salts of different colors. |
| Promethium |
Pm |
The existence of promethium was first predicted by Bohuslav Brauner in 1902; this prediction was confirmed by Henry Moseley in 1914. The name promethium is derived from Prometheus in Greek mythology, who stole the fire of the sky and gave it to mankind. |
| Protactinium |
Pa |
Protactinium was first identified in 1913, when Kasimir Fajans and O. H. Göhring encountered short-lived isotope 234m-Pa, with a half-life of about 1.17 minutes, during their studies of the decay chain of 238-U. They gave the new element the name Brevium (Latin brevis, brief, short); the name was changed to Protoactinium in 1918 when two groups of scientists (Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner of Germany and Frederick Soddy and John Cranston of the UK) independently discovered 231-Pa, and shortened to Protactinium in 1949. |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Radium |
Ra |
Radium (Latin radius, ray) was discovered by Marie Curie and her husband Pierre in 1898 in pitchblende/uraninite from North Bohemia. While studying pitchblende the Curies removed uranium from it and found that the remaining material was still radioactive. They then separated out a radioactive mixture mostly consisting of barium which gave a brilliant red flame color and spectral lines which had never been documented before. In 1902 radium was isolated into its pure metal by Curie and Andre Debierne through the electrolysis of a pure radium chloride solution by using a mercury cathode and distilling in an atmosphere of hydrogen gas. |
| Radon |
Rn |
Radon (named for radium) was discovered in 1900 by Friedrich Ernst Dorn, who called it radium emanation. In 1908 William Ramsay and Robert Whytlaw-Gray, who named it niton (Latin nitens meaning "shining"; symbol Nt), isolated it, determined its density and that it was the heaviest known gas. It has been called radon since 1923. |
| Rhenium |
Re |
Rhenium (Latin Rhenus meaning "Rhine") was the last naturally-occurring element to be discovered. The existence of an as-yet undiscovered element at this position in the periodic table had been predicted by Henry Moseley in 1914. It is generally considered to be discovered by Walter Noddack, Ida Tacke, and Otto Berg in Germany. In 1925 they reported that they detected the element in platinum ore and in the mineral columbite. They also found rhenium in gadolinite and molybdenite. In 1928 they were able to extract 1 g of element by processing 660 kg of molybdenite. |
| Rhodium |
Rh |
Rhodium (Greek rhodon meaning "rose") was discovered in 1803 by William Hyde Wollaston soon after his discovery of palladium. Wollaston made this discovery in England using crude platinum ore that he presumably obtained from South America. |
| Roentgenium |
Rg |
Roentgenium was first created at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany on December 8, 1994. The name roentgenium was accepted as a permanent name on November 1, 2004 in honour of Wilhelm Roentgen; before this date, the element was known under the temporary IUPAC systematic element name unununium. Some research has referred to it as "eka-gold". |
| Rubidium |
Rb |
Rubidium (Latin rubidus, deepest red) was discovered in 1861 by Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff in the mineral lepidolite through the use of a spectroscope. However this element had minimal industrial use until the 1920s. Historically, the most important use for rubidium has been in research and development, primarily in chemical and electronic applications. |
| Ruthenium |
Ru |
Ruthenium (Latin Ruthenia meaning "Russia") was discovered and isolated by Karl Klaus in 1844. Klaus showed that ruthenium oxide contained a new metal and obtained 6 grams of ruthenium from the part of crude platinum that is insoluble in aqua regia. |
| Rutherfordium |
Rf |
Rutherfordium (named in honor of Lord Rutherford of Nelson) was reportedly first synthesized in 1964 at the Joint Nuclear Research Institute at Dubna (U.S.S.R.). |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Samarium |
Sm |
Samarium was first discovered spectroscopically in 1853 by Swiss chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac by its sharp absorption lines in didymium, and isolated in Paris in 1879 by French chemist Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran from the mineral samarskite ((Y,Ce,U,Fe)3(Nb,Ta,Ti)5O16). Like the mineral, it was named after a Russian mine official, Colonel Samarski. |
| Scandium |
Sc |
Lars Fredrick Nilson and his team, apparently unaware of that prediction in the spring of 1879, were looking for rare earth metals; using spectrum analysis he found a new element within the minerals euxenite and gadolinite. He named it Scandium, from the Latin Scandia meaning "Scandinavia", and by way of isolating the element he processed 10 kilograms of euxenite with other rare-earth residues, obtaining about 2 grams of very pure scandium oxide (Sc2O3). |
| Seaborgium |
Sg |
Element 106 was discovered almost simultaneously by two different laboratories.
In June 1974, a Soviet team led by G. N. Flerov at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna reported producing an isotope with mass number 259 and a half-life of 0.48 s, and in September 1974, an American research team led by Albert Ghiorso at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley reported creating an isotope with mass number 263 and a half-life of 1.0 s. Because their work was independently confirmed first, the Americans suggested the name seaborgium to honor the American chemist Glenn T. Seaborg. This name was extremely controversial because Seaborg was still alive. An international committee decided in 1992 that the Berkeley and Dubna laboratories should share credit for the discovery. An element naming controversy erupted and as a result IUPAC adopted unnilhexium (symbol Unh) as a temporary, systematic element name. In 1994 a committee of IUPAC recommended that element 106 be named rutherfordium and adopted a rule that no element can be named after a living person. This ruling was fiercely objected to by the American Chemical Society. Critics pointed out that a precedent had been set in the naming of einsteinium during Albert Einstein's life. In 1997, as part of a compromise involving elements 104 to 108, the name seaborgium for element 106 was recognized internationally.
|
| Selenium |
Se |
Selenium (Greek σελήνη selene meaning "Moon") was discovered in 1817 by Jöns Jakob Berzelius who found the element associated with tellurium. |
| Silicon |
Si |
Silicon (Latin silex, silicis meaning flint) was first identified by Antoine Lavoisier in 1787, and was later mistaken by Humphry Davy, in 1800, for a compound. In 1811 Gay Lussac and Thénard probably prepared impure amorphous silicon through the heating of potassium with silicon tetrafluoride. In 1824 Berzelius prepared amorphous silicon using approximately the same method of Lussac. Berzelius also purified the product by repeatedly washing it. |
| Silver |
Ag |
Silver (from Anglo-Saxon seolfor, compare Old High German silabar; Ag is from the Latin argentum) has been known since ancient times. It is mentioned in the book of Genesis, and slag heaps found in Asia Minor and on the islands of the Aegean Sea indicate that silver was being separated from lead as early as the 4th millennium BCE. |
| Sodium |
Na |
Sodium (English, soda) has long been recognized in compounds, but was not isolated until 1807 by Sir Humphry Davy through the electrolysis of caustic soda. In medieval Europe a compound of sodium with the Latin name of sodanum was used as a headache remedy. Sodium's symbol, Na, comes for the neo-Latin name for a common sodium compound named natrium, which comes from the Greek nítron, a kind of natural salt. |
| Strontium |
Sr |
Adair Crawford recognized the mineral strontianite, named after the Scottish town of Strontian, as differing from other barium minerals in 1790.Hope discovered strontium itself in 1798 and metallic strontium was first isolated by Sir Humphry Davy in 1808 using electrolysis. Strontium is named for the town of Strontian in Scotland. |
| Sulfur |
S |
Sulfur (Sanskrit, sulvere; Latin sulpur) was known in ancient times, and is referred to in the Biblical Pentateuch (Genesis). English translations of this commonly refer to sulfur as "brimstone", giving rise to the name of 'Fire and brimstone' sermons, which are sermons where hell and eternal damnation for sinners is stressed. It is from this part of the Bible that hell is thought to smell of sulfur. The word itself is almost certainly from the Arabic sufra meaning yellow, from the bright color of the naturally-occurring form. |
| Name |
Symbol |
Explanations |
| Tantalum |
Ta |
Tantalum (Greek Tantalus, mythological character) was discovered in Sweden in 1802 by Anders Ekeberg and isolated in 1820 by Jöns Berzelius. Many contemporary chemists believed niobium and tantalum were the same elements until 1844 and later 1866 when researchers showed that niobic and tantalic acids were different compounds. Early investigators were only able to isolate impure metal and the first relatively pure ductile metal was produced by Werner von Bolton in 1903. Wires made with tantalum metal were used for light bulbs until tungsten replaced it. Its name is derived from the character Tantalus, father of Niobe in Greek mythology, who was punished after death by being condemned to stand knee-deep in water with perfect fruit growing above his head, both of which eternally tantalized him - if he bent to drink the water, it drained below the level he could reach, and if he reached for the fruit, the branches moved out of his grasp. This was considered similar to tantalum's general non-reactivity—it sits among reagents and is unaffected by them. |
| Technetium |
Tc |
In 1877 Russian chemist Serge Kern reported discovery of the missing element in platinum ore. Kern named what he thought was the new element davyum, after the noted English chemist Sir Humphry Davy, but it was determined to be a mixture of iridium, rhodium and iron. Another candidate, lucium, followed in 1896 but it was determined to be yttrium. Then in 1908 the Japanese chemist Masataka Ogawa found evidence in the mineral thorianite for what he thought indicated the presence of element 43. Ogawa named the element nipponium, after Japan (which is Nippon in Japanese). Later analysis indicated the presence of rhenium (element 75), not element 43. |
| Tellurium |
Te |
Tellurium (Latin tellus meaning "earth") was discovered in 1782 by the Hungarian Franz-Joseph Müller von Reichenstein (Müller Ferenc) in Transylvania. In 1798 it was named by Martin Heinrich Klaproth who earlier isolated it. |
| Terbium |
Tb |
Terbium was discovered in 1843 by Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander, who detected it as an impurity in Yttrium-oxide, Y2O3, and named after the village Ytterby in Sweden. It was not isolated in pure form until the recent advent of ion exchange techniques. |
| Thallium |
Tl |
Thallium (Greek thallos meaning "a green shoot or twig") was discovered by Sir William Crookes in 1861 in England while he was making spectroscopic determinations for tellurium on residues from a sulfuric acid plant. The name comes from Thallium's bright green spectral emission lines. In 1862 Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy isolated the metal independent of each other. |
| Thorium |
Th |
Thorium was discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, who named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. The metal had virtually no uses until the invention of the lantern mantle in 1885. The name ionium was given early in the study of radioactive elements to the 230Th isotope produced in the decay chain of 238U before it was realized that ionium and thorium were chemically identical. The symbol Io was used for this supposed element. |
| Thulium |
Tm |
Thulium was discovered by Swedish chemist Per Teodor Cleve in 1879 by looking for impurities in the oxides of other rare earth elements (this was the same method Carl Gustaf Mosander earlier used to discover some other rare earths elements). Cleve started by removing all of the known contaminants of erbia (Er2O3) and upon additional processing, obtained two new substances; one brown and one green. The brown substance turned out to be the oxide of the element holmium and was named holmia by Cleve and the green substance was the oxide of an unknown element. Cleve named the oxide thulia and its element thulium after Thule, an ancient Roman name for a mythical country in the far north, perhaps Scandinavia. |
| Tin |
Sn |
The word "tin" has cognates in many Germanic and Celtic languages. The American Heritage Dictionary speculates that the word was borrowed from a pre-Indo-European language. |
| Titanium |
Ti |
Titanium (Latin Titans, Earth or the first sons of Gaia) was discovered in England by Reverend William Gregor in 1791. He recognised the presence of a new element in ilmenite, and named it menachite. At around the same time, Franz Joseph Muller also produced a similar substance, but could not identify it. The element was independently rediscovered several years later by German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth in rutile ore. Klaproth confirmed it as a new element and in 1795 he named it for the Latin word for Earth (also the name for the Titans of Greek mythology). |
| Tungsten |
W |
Tungsten (Swedish and Danish tung sten meaning "heavy stone", even though the current name for the element in Swedish is Wolfram) was first hypothesized to exist by Peter Woulfe in 1779 who examined wolframite and concluded that it must contain a new substance. In 1781 Carl Wilhelm Scheele ascertained that a new acid could be made from tungstenite. Scheele and Torbern Bergman suggested that it could be possible to obtain a new metal by reducing tungstic acid. In 1783 José and Fausto Elhuyar found an acid in wolframite that was identical to tungstic acid. In Spain later that year the brothers succeeded in isolating tungsten through reduction of this acid with charcoal. They are credited with the discovery of the element. |
