berkeliumnoun · 1949
Well attestedThe discoverers picked the name as a deliberate echo of an older element named for a Swedish village.
Stanley Thompson, Albert Ghiorso and Glenn Seaborg made element 97 in December 1949 at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. Seaborg noted that berkelium sat directly below terbium in the periodic table, so naming it for Berkeley mirrored terbium's debt to Ytterby. The bulk of the world's berkelium-249 is now bred in the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge, in quantities measured in milligrams.
Named from the placeRead →