Most people could name many of the elements, but how many of us know how they got those names?
Each of the 115
known
chemical elements was discovered over the last few thousand years, from
before recorded history began to the nuclear laboratories of the 21st
century.
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British scientists and the elements
- Humphry Davy discovered nine elements using electrolysis - the splitting up of compounds into elements by applying electricity.
- William Ramsay discovered a new group of unreactive elements using spectroscopy, now called the noble gases.
- William Crookes identified helium for the first time, and also discovered thallium.
Their chosen names were influenced by an ever changing mix of language, culture and our understanding of chemistry.
So how did they get these names? And why do they end in -ium?
Ancient Elements
Several elements' names have Anglo-Saxon language origins, including gold, iron, copper and silver.
These metals were known long before they got these names,
however. Gold can be found in its pure form in nature and although iron
is usually found in ores which require smelting, the earliest known iron
artefacts, from 3500 BCE, derive from purer metal from meteorites.
The Latin names of these elements are commemorated in their atomic symbols, Au (aurum) for gold and Fe (ferrum) for iron.
The Romans began the practise of element names ending in "-um," with Victorian scientists continuing the trend.
Meteoric iron was used by humans before smelting of iron ores was invented.
Element of uncertainty
Since 1947, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (
IUPAC)
has had the responsibility for approving elements' names, and deciding
the single internationally recognised symbol for each element.
Before this, there were multiple historical occasions of
elements being given several names, usually due to simultaneous
discovery or uncertainty over a discovery.
The name of element 41 was not agreed for 150 years. It was
called columbium in America and niobium in Europe until IUPAC finally
decided the official name would be niobium in 1949.
Dr Fabienne Meyers, Associate Director of IUPAC, explains the current naming
process: To start with, "the discoverers are invited to propose a name and a symbol."
"For linguistic consistency, the recommended practice is that all new elements should end in '-ium'," she adds.
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“Start Quote
The sake of naming an element is essentially to avoid confusion.”
Dr Fabienne Meyers
Associate Direcor, IUPAC
"Since the sake of naming an
element is essentially to avoid confusion, it is important to ensure
that the proposed name is unique and has not been used earlier even
unofficially or temporarily for a different element."
"After examination and acceptance by the division - which
includes a public review period of five months - the name and symbol are
then submitted to the IUPAC Council for approval."
The name is then published in the scientific journal
Pure and Applied Chemistry.
Actinium to zirconium
A common source of names both now and historically, over a
quarter of the elements are named after a place, often where they were
discovered or synthesised.
These places range in size from continents (europium) and
countries (americium, francium, polonium) to the the Scottish village
Strontian (strontium).
Because of the great wealth of discoveries made there, four
elements are named after the Swedish mining village, Ytterby (ytterbium,
yttrium, erbium and terbium).
There is just one element that wasn't first discovered on
Earth, and it too is named after its place of the discovery - helium,
from the Greek word for Sun, helios.
Myth and legend
Dmitri Mendeleev published the periodic table in its modern form.
About a dozen elements take their name directly from legends, including titanium, arsenic and tantalum.
Nickel and cobalt are named after 'devil' and 'kobold', from
the Germanic folk belief that malign creatures snuck into mines to
replace valuable and similar-looking copper and silver ores with these
less valuable ones.
In 1949 the artificial element Promethium was named after
Prometheus, the man in Greek legend punished with eternal torture for
stealing fire from the gods, as a reference to the great difficulty and
sacrifice needed to synthesise new elements.
Eponymous elements
Modestly, no discoverer has ever named an element after him or
herself, but several scientists have been honoured by having elements
named after them. These include
curium,
einsteinium and
fermium.
Seaborgium, named after American chemist
Glenn Seaborg, was the first element to be named after a living scientist.
There is also mendelevium, named after
Dmitri Mendeleev,
the Russian scientist who established the first periodic table in 1869,
and fitted the known elements into their places in the table based on
their properties.
Elemental techniques
Sample of chlorine created by Humphry Davy in 1810. It is named after the Greek word for green.
Fifty elements were discovered in the 19th Century, the
greatest number of any century. By comparison, twenty nine elements were
discovered in the 20th Century, and five new ones have been synthesised
so far in the 21st.
Frank James, Professor of the History of Science at The Royal
Institution in London, where several elements were discovered, says
that the contribution of British scientists was very important.
"Using electro-chemical methods, Humphry Davy either isolated
or demonstrated the elemental nature of a total of nine chemical
elements naming most of them in the process, such as sodium, potassium
and chlorine."
British scientist William Ramsay used a powerful new technique,
spectroscopy,
to discover the noble gases, a group of elements which had evaded
discovery due to their lack of reactivity. He used Greek words to name
neon (new), xenon (stranger), krypton (hidden), and argon (inactive).
Colours and sense
Colours are a name source for nine elements. Each element can
be identified by the colours it emits using spectroscopy, and several
elements are named after the brightest colour they emit, including
indium and rubidium.
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Spectroscopy
Each element can be made to emit a unique spectrum of light
which identifies it like a fingerprint. Helium's emission spectrum is
shown above.
WATCH:
Brian Cox explains how the colour of stars reveals what they are made of
WATCH:
Brian Cox explains how the chemical elements are created within stars
Visible traits are a major source
of names, but the other senses are represented too: osmium and bromine
are named for their smell, and aluminium is named after the Latin word
for the bitter tasting chemical in which it was first discovered, alum.
Ununpentium onwards
The newest element to be
experimentally confirmed,
element 115, will be called ununpentium until an official name is
decided, and 114 (Flerovium) and 116 (Livermorium) were named in 2012.
IUPAC's Dr Meyers explains that although all recent elements
have been named after people and places, "a mythological concept or
character, a mineral or a property of the element could also be used as
the root for an acceptable name."
And with no shortage of eminent scientists and important
centres of science as inspiration, new names will always retain an
element of surprise.
