In 1993 Al Ghiorso received a phone call from the New York Times. Fifty years earlier, his only claim to fame had been illegally breaking a ham radio record. Thanks to the TWG ruling, he was officially credited with the discovery of 11 elements. This had beaten a 185-year-old record for element discovery held by the British chemist Humphry Davy. Albert Ghiorso, the bootlegger’s son with a bachelor’s degree, was the most successful element hunter of all time.
For Ghiorso, the sweetest triumph was recognition that Berkeley had discovered element 106. It had taken 20 years, but finally the team could pick a name. Ghiorso had been thinking of ‘alvarezium’, after his friend and colleague Luis Alvarez. Other inspirations included Frédéric Joliot-Curie (mainly because the Russians had been considering it for element 102); famous figures of the past such as Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci or Christopher Columbus; and the mythical sailor Odysseus. Matti Nurmia had pressed for an alternative: finlandium. ‘At the time,’ Nurmia reasoned, ‘there were two Americans and three Finns in the group …’
The names were still rumbling in Ghiorso’s mind as he picked up the phone. The reporter on the line was Malcolm Browne. Browne had started out life as a chemist but had turned to journalism after being drafted in the Korean War and assigned to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. He’d risen steadily and was eventually appointed chief correspondent for Indochina for the Associated Press. There, he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his haunting image of the death of Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk who had set himself on fire in an act of protest. Since 1977 Browne had mixed war reportage with the science beat. When it came to element discovery, there wasn’t much difference.
‘What are you going to name element 106?’ Browne asked, mischievously probing for a scoop. ‘Ghiorsium?’
Ghiorso laughed. He’d first heard the suggestion in 1957, at a Christmas party, when Glenn Seaborg had given him a large bottle labelled: ‘110 – Ghiorsium: a worthless metal … can only be prepared between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. … spontaneously inflammable … just generally falls apart in a hell of a hurry. Also has an automatic transmission.’ Ghiorso didn’t share the anecdote with Browne. Instead, he deflected the question, chatted amiably for a while, then put the phone down.
But Browne’s comment had sparked something in Ghiorso’s mind. No element in history had ever been named after a living person. However, there was no rule against it – just an unofficial chat with the Russians that such an idea would be avoided. Still, Ghiorso had an idea, and told the rest of the discovery team. They all agreed. On 2 December 1993 Ghiorso created a special cover for his folder charting the story of element 106 and made his way to Glenn Seaborg’s office. At Ghiorso’s prompt, his friend and colleague of 50 years opened it and read the inscription.
Dear Glenn, the team has decided unanimously that the only name for element 106 is yours!
Seaborg was astonished. ‘I was incredibly touched,’ he later recalled in his autobiography. ‘This honour would be much greater than any prize or award because it is forever; it would last as long as there are periodic tables.’ A name scrawled into an 1867 ledger by an immigration officer who couldn’t spell Sjöberg was about to grace science’s chemical trophy cabinet.
Element 106. Seaborgium.
By the time Browne and Ghiorso had their chat, the other missing element names had started to slip into place. Element 101 was, indisputably, ‘mendelevium’. Element 102 was more or less accepted as ‘nobelium’, despite both the US and Russians agreeing that the Swedish team who’d come up with the name hadn’t discovered the element at all. Element 103 was ‘lawrencium’.
The next two elements, 104 and 105, were harder to pinpoint. The Americans were adamant they wanted ‘rutherfordium’ and ‘hahnium’. The Russians, meanwhile, insisted on their right to name the elements as ‘not only an honorary privilege for the discoverers but also an acknowledgement of their intellectual property and the expenses of the laboratory’. Their names for 104 and 105 remained ‘kurchatovium’ and ‘nielsbohrium’; maybe ‘dubnium’ as a potential compromise.
That left GSI. Their response to the TWG was the most magnanimous, acknowledging the contributions of both the Russians and Americans. Even so, Gottfried Münzenberg remembers pressure coming from both sides. ‘I got phone calls from Berkeley in the middle of the night,’ he told me. ‘They were saying things like “We’re sitting here with Seaborg and we want to propose names.” They didn’t want Kurchatov, but they did want Seaborg! It wasn’t consistent. When we announced our names, we got a phone call from Berkeley saying they wouldn’t come [and support our name choices] if we backed “kurchatovium”.’
The Germans tried to stay neutral. They backed ‘seaborgium’, but suggested element 107 should be ‘nielsbohrium’ (hoping that would ease tensions around element 105), and because they ‘fully agree[d] with the Dubna group that Niels Bohr highly merit[ed] to be honoured by the name of an element’.1
Fortunately, their two remaining elements, 108 and 109, were easy to name without controversy. GSI was in the German state of Hesse, the Latin name for which was Hassia. Seeing as how everyone else named an element after their local area, they decided to stick to tradition and proposed that element 108 would be ‘hassium’.
Münzenberg’s choice for element 109 was intended to right a past mistake. The most important German contribution to nuclear science had been the discovery of fission. Berkeley were already proposing an element after one leader of the team that had made the breakthrough, Otto Hahn. The Germans wanted the other main contributor remembered too. Lise Meitner had been overlooked because of rampant sexism in the Nobel Committee; she had been persecuted and forced to flee her home by an evil that wanted her dead because of an accident of birth. Giving her an element was a chance for atonement.
‘Meitnerium,’ Hofmann told me, ‘was a clear choice. She suffered so much as a scientist under the Nazis in the 1930s and had to escape Germany because she was Jewish. Despite this she was the main physicist in Otto Hahn’s team – at a time when women were hardly accepted.’ The GSI team couldn’t put an end to sexism in science, but they could damn well remind people that great women existed. With curium named after both Marie and Pierre Curie, meitnerium would become, to date, the only element named solely after a non-mythological woman.2
The Germans hadn’t waited around for the world to accept their elements – they had delayed for 10 years and weren’t going to sit around any longer. On 7 September 1992 they held a ceremony and made the names official.
All the teams could do was wait to see if chemistry’s IUPAC, and its physics equivalent IUPAP, would accept their choices.
* * *
Ian Fraser Kilmister isn’t someone you’ll find in a science textbook. As the leather-faced, raspy-voiced lead singer of rockers Motörhead, ‘Lemmy’ was better known for his trademark mutton chops, cowboy hat and a hard livin’ lifestyle than his skill with test tubes and a Bunsen burner. I once saw him live, on a wet, miserable evening in Manchester, UK. He belted out his hit ‘Ace of Spades’ with a sullen growl, only to come to a stop at the second verse. Then, guitar hanging loose, he walked over to the amp controls to crank them up even higher before launching back where he’d left off. My hearing didn’t recover for three days.
But in spite of his absent scientific pedigree, Lemmy also inspired the most popular suggestion for an element name in history. The singer had the fortune – or misfortune – of dying in late 2015, just as a new batch of elements were confirmed. The announcement inspired the public to get involved in suggesting possible names, and Lemmy’s was at the top of the list. By the time the element’s names were settled, a petition of 157,438 supporters demanded that element 115 be ‘lemmium’. What better name could you have, they argued, for a superheavy metal?
Sadly, a new element could never have been named after Lemmy. After the chaos of the transfermium wars, IUPAC had put together some guidelines about just what could have an element named after it. In 2016 the recommendations became official. The categories were broad but defined. First, an element should end in ‘-ium’ (unless it was a halogen, like chlorine or iodine, in which case it got an ‘-ine’, or a noble gas, like neon or krypton, which earned itself an ‘-on’). Next, elements could only be named after five things: a scientist; a property of the element; a mineral the element came from; a place; or a mythical creature. This is basically just tradition – but the categories are broad enough to let scientists go wild if they wish. There is one final rule, designed to dispel any confusion: you cannot use a name already given to a chemical element, or that was once given and used widely before it was retracted.
The rules put paid to Enrico Fermi’s ‘ausonium’ and ‘hesperium’ (they were widely used) and ended Lemmy fans’ dreams of their hero appearing on the periodic table: while his status borders on legendary, Stoke-on-Trent’s favourite rock god3 doesn’t qualify as a mythical creature. ‘IUPAC has to be very neutral,’ explains Lynn Soby, IUPAC’s executive director. ‘We just manage the process of working with the assigned laboratories and scientists. There are limits, guidelines if you will. But it’s still broad if one thinks about mythological characters. There are lots of different creative opportunities for names.’
Today, the IUPAC process for recognising a new element is simple. A panel assesses all claims and decides which, if any, have enough evidence to prove an element has been made. The panel then announces which lab – or labs – have priority: the right to call themselves the discoverer. As the discoverer, the lab gets the honour of suggesting a name for the new element to IUPAC. If they don’t do it within six months, they lose out and IUPAC has to name the element. In an effort to avoid a repeat of the transfermium wars, in the case of a joint discovery where the laboratories fail to agree on a name within this time period, the honour again defaults to IUPAC.
IUPAC doesn’t have to approve the suggested name automatically: since 1947, the final decision has rested with IUPAC’s council. In theory, it is possible for IUPAC to reject the name and put forward their own choice – although this, Soby muses, is a last resort.
Provisional name selected, the next part is the public consultation. This is basically a sense check to make sure the name isn’t stupid or offensive to a global audience. ‘One never knows what the general public will bring,’ Soby says. ‘One issue is that the name is going to be used in multiple languages. We need to check whether it has any negative connotations, whether it is pronounceable in all languages and whether it is sensitive in any way.’ Just because a name seems harmless in English and French doesn’t mean it isn’t rude in Turkish. ‘We want people to look at the proposed names, really evaluate them in their native language and see if there are any problems.’ For example, given its dirty meaning in German, it’s unlikely ‘wixhausium’ would be approved.
It’s only after this public consultation that the element names are finally accepted; even then, it still takes a few months before IUPAC and IUPAP’s joint working party ratifies the decision. Once that happens, the names are locked in forever – even if it’s later shown that the element was discovered by someone else.
At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. In 1994 IUPAC’s announcement of the new names didn’t go smoothly. The suggestions from Berkeley, Dubna and GSI had been gathered up, considered and put in front of a 20-strong panel of chemists from around the world. Faced with competing names from groups with equal priority, the working party decided to try and strike a compromise and blend the American, Russian and German choices together.
The new elements would be:
|
101 |
mendelevium |
|
102 |
nobelium |
|
103 |
lawrencium |
|
104 |
dubnium |
|
105 |
joliotium |
|
106 |
rutherfordium |
|
107 |
bohrium |
|
108 |
hahnium |
|
109 |
meitnerium |
The new names were a terrible mistake. ‘Joliotium’ had never been used for element 105 before. Niels Bohr’s first name had been hacked off element 107, which made it sound identical to boron, while ‘hahnium’ – an American suggestion – had been plastered on an element discovered indisputably by the Germans. Worse, ‘rutherfordium’ had previously been elements 103 and 104, but it was now sitting as element 106, its third place in the periodic table in 30 years. It soon emerged as the most controversial of IUPAC’s decisions. The US team had announced their choice of ‘seaborgium’ to the world and it had been supported by the Germans. Instead of arguing, IUPAC had, retroactively, decided to create a new rule: elements couldn’t be named after a living person. ‘Seaborgium’ was off the table. As The Economist noted at the time: ‘When it comes to giving things names, scientists have a habit of throwing logic out the window.’
The superheavy community didn’t take the decision lying down. The US National Academy of Sciences, IUPAC’s biggest supporter, allegedly threatened to pull funding if IUPAC didn’t back down on the names and allow ‘seaborgium’ to stand. ‘I don’t know what motivated IUPAC to do it,’ recalls chemist Paul Karol. Today a member of the IUPAC/IUPAP joint working party in charge of deciding when an element is discovered, at the time Karol was so incensed he wrote a White Paper attacking the working party’s choices. ‘I can understand them floating the idea of not naming elements after living scientists, but it had become an edict. They didn’t put it out for public review, so they immediately took heat. Seaborg was universally regarded as a giant in science, he’d made huge contributions. It was stupid.’
Karol felt the Americans were being portrayed unfairly as the bully boys of the element world while the Russians, who had somehow pressured IUPAC to rule out ‘seaborgium’, were getting what they wanted. Karol’s suspicions were correct – although the Russians’ motives were less political and more centred on the gentleman’s agreement they had with Berkeley. ‘It was agreed not to give names from living scientists by the people involved [in the discovery dispute, before they announced seaborgium],’ Andrey Popeko recalls. ‘It was agreed. From Dubna, we agreed to move kurchatovium. We appealed seaborgium because it was agreed! I have nothing against Glenn Seaborg. But. It. Was. Agreed.’4
IUPAC suddenly found itself under assault. Buckling under pressure from their largest backer, the working party quickly dropped the ‘no living scientist’ rule and met again, creating another list of names in 1995. This time, to appease the Russians and ease any soreness about Seaborg’s name appearing, they decided to add Georgy Flerov’s name to the table and mostly adopted the Russian names:
|
101 |
mendelevium |
|
102 |
flerovium |
|
103 |
lawrencium |
|
104 |
dubnium |
|
105 |
joliotium |
|
106 |
seaborgium |
|
107 |
nielsbohrium |
|
108 |
hahnium |
|
109 |
meitnerium |
Bohr had its ‘niels’ back, and ‘rutherfordium’ – previously three different elements – had vanished entirely. Still, the international community screamed for blood. The Americans had ‘seaborgium’ but felt ‘all the rest of the USA-proposed names were being held hostage in return for retaining it’. Comments flew in from chemical societies around the world, with the Chinese and Japanese chemistry communities backing the Americans.
The chaos of the transfermium wars had reignited. In 1996 the Germans decided to hold a celebration for Peter Armbruster’s sixty-fifth birthday and invited the Americans and Russians along. Gottfried Münzenberg told me what happened next: ‘Armbruster had invited Seaborg, Ghiorso and Oganessian. They gave talks, and with Sigurd [Hofmann], we all came together in the evening to discuss the elements. We offered them wine. Ghiorso said: “We won’t drink wine.” So, we ordered sparkling water. Ghiorso said: “We don’t want sparkling water.” So, we brought them still water. Ghiorso said “We want water from the tap!” That was the kind of atmosphere … we were neutral, we had no interest in the names, our aim was to find a solution.’5
In 1997, bloodied and weary by two years of threats, protests, arguments and complaints, IUPAC met in Geneva and put together its final list:
|
101 |
mendelevium |
|
102 |
nobelium |
|
103 |
lawrencium |
|
104 |
rutherfordium |
|
105 |
dubnium |
|
106 |
seaborgium |
|
107 |
bohrium |
|
108 |
hassium |
|
109 |
meitnerium |
The Germans still didn’t like losing the ‘niels’ from ‘bohrium’, but at least they were given the names they had suggested five years earlier. The Americans were mostly satisfied, although still insisted 105 should be called ‘hahnium’. The Russians lost any reference to Kurchatov and Flerov; they were also forced to accept the old Swedish name for element 102. But this time there was no protest. The names were settled.
The choice nearly claimed one victim. Driving along the Californian coast, one of Seaborg’s two living daughters heard the announcement of the new element names on the radio. She knew about the rule that elements couldn’t be named after a living person but had missed that the decision had been reversed. When she heard her dad’s name read out as an element, she came to the only natural conclusion: he was dead. Bursting into tears, she almost swerved off the road before she regained enough composure to pull over and call her (still alive) father.
The transfermium wars were, at last, over. In their span, they had seen three different elements named ‘rutherfordium’, three different names for element 102 and two different versions of ‘bohrium’. Finally, everyone could move on.
Because of the ‘no repeating element names’ rule, some of nuclear chemistry’s pioneers would also never have an element named after them: Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Otto Hahn’s names had been discarded forever. The latter was a poetic twist. Hahn had been remembered by the Nobel Committee when his partner Lise Meitner had been overlooked; now she would appear on the periodic table while he would be forgotten. Chemistry has an odd habit of reaching equilibrium.
For Glenn Seaborg, the story was different: ‘seaborgium’ was confirmed. It was the ultimate honour and, as his colleagues were quick to point out, made him the only person to whom you could address a letter using only chemical elements:
Seaborgium,
Lawrencium Berkelium,
Californium,
Americium.
Despite being 86 years old, Seaborg kept a schedule that would have exhausted a man half his age. He was in the process of writing two books, was still bending the ear of US presidents and had been hammering the cause for science in education, trying to convince California’s governor to make learning a priority. In August 1998 Seaborg flew to Boston for the American Chemical Society’s fall meeting: the biggest chemistry event on the planet. Over the course of a few days, almost 18,000 chemists descended on the city, picking it clean of hotel rooms, conference halls and those little lanyards to hold a name badge. Its delegates represented every discipline: materials science, agrochemicals, organic and inorganic chemistry, analytics, geochemistry, toxicology, medicinal chemistry and more.
There, in front of his peers, Seaborg collected a lifetime achievement award – something not given before or since. The 150,000 members of the American Chemical Society had voted Seaborg the third greatest chemist of the past 75 years. The other two, Linus Pauling and Robert Burns Woodward, had died; in the eyes of his peers, that made Glenn Theodore Seaborg the greatest chemist alive.
Seaborg collected the award, gave a speech, then descended to walk the hall, signing the new periodic tables that bore his name. That night, as part of the routine he had started 60 years earlier, Seaborg decided to stretch his legs and walk up and down the hotel emergency stairs. There, alone, he suffered a stroke and collapsed. By the time help arrived, Seaborg was almost entirely paralysed. Six months later, on 25 February 1999, bedridden and suffering from arthritis so severe it made any movement agony, he chose to stop taking food and end his life.
With Seaborg, the era of the superheavy element giants passed into history. Of the original element hunters, only Al Ghiorso remained. But the race to the next elements had continued. Throughout the 1990s, Berkeley, GSI and the Dubna–Livermore teams had all continued to push boundaries a young Seaborg could barely have imagined.
On one of his last visits to his friend, Ghiorso even had to honour a $100 bet made decades earlier. It had been Glenn Seaborg’s dream to see the shores of the island of stability. Under Oganessian, the Dubna–Livermore team had discovered a single atom of element 114. It should have been so unstable that it wouldn’t even have met IUPAC’s definition of an element. Instead, it had a half-life of 30 seconds.
‘I wanted Glenn to know,’ Ghiorso would later recall in The Transuranium People. ‘I went to his bedside and told him. I thought I saw a gleam in his eye, but the next day, when I went to visit him, he didn’t remember seeing me. As a scientist, he died when he had that stroke.’
The Dubna sighting of element 114 wasn’t the only superheavy breakthrough of the 1990s. Even as the naming arguments raged, the hunt had continued – and both Dubna and GSI had been busy.
Notes
1 You’ll remember that ‘niels’ was added to distinguish the element from boron (which, in German, is Bor). There was another good reason too: Niels’s son Aage Bohr had won the Nobel Prize in 1975 – the first name settled any confusion about which Bohr they were talking about.
2 Cerium, europium, niobium, selenium, tellurium and vanadium are all named, directly or indirectly, after goddesses.
3 With apologies to Slash from Guns N’ Roses, who is also from Stoke and comes a close second.
4 I couldn’t confirm this agreement with the surviving members of the Berkeley team, but the emphasis here isn’t for show – even 25 years on, the emotions stirred are felt acutely.
5 Hofmann remembers it was Seaborg who demanded tap water, but you get the idea.