Einsteinium

Einsteinium was discovered in 1952, not in a laboratory but in the fallout of the first hydrogen-bomb test, code-named Ivy Mike, in the Pacific; it was identified by a team led by Albert Ghiorso from the debris, and its existence was kept secret for several years. It was named after Albert Einstein. Einsteinium is a soft, silvery, intensely radioactive metal, made only in minute amounts and studied purely as a subject of research. Produced in vanishingly small quantities in high-flux reactors, einsteinium has no use beyond pure science; even weighing and studying a few micrograms is a considerable feat, and it has served chiefly as a target in attempts to create still heavier elements, including mendelevium.

Einstein himself had no direct role in the weapons programme that inadvertently created the element bearing his name: his connection was the 1939 letter he co-signed to President Roosevelt, warning that Nazi Germany might be pursuing an atomic bomb and urging American research into the possibility, a letter that helped set the Manhattan Project in motion years before Ivy Mike's fallout produced the actual element named for him. Einstein reportedly had mixed feelings about that letter for the rest of his life, given the destructive uses the resulting research eventually enabled.

Einsteinium's origin is among the most dramatic of any element: it was forged in the extreme neutron flux of a thermonuclear explosion, the November 1952 test that first demonstrated the hydrogen bomb, where uranium atoms rapidly absorbed many neutrons to build up heavy new nuclei. Because the discovery came from a secret weapons test, its announcement was delayed until 1955.

The element was named for Albert Einstein, whose famous equation relating mass and energy underlay the very nuclear physics that had created it, though Einstein, a lifelong advocate of peace, was an ironic patron for a substance born of a bomb. Einsteinium has no ancient or esoteric tradition, being a synthetic element of the atomic age; its story binds the name of the century's greatest physicist to the fire of the hydrogen bomb. Recovering even that first sample required specially equipped aircraft to fly through the radioactive cloud collecting debris on filter papers, from which chemists eventually isolated roughly 200 micrograms of the new element buried among tonnes of coral, seawater and fallout, an extraction effort as extraordinary in its own way as the explosion that had created the material in the first place.