Discovery of mendelevium

Mendelevium was first made in 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, by Albert Ghiorso, Bernard Harvey, Gregory Choppin, Stanley Thompson and Glenn Seaborg. They bombarded a minute sample of einsteinium with alpha particles in a cyclotron and, with an ingenious chemical separation, detected the new element, atomic number 101, in a few atoms at a time. It was the first element to be discovered one atom at a time. They named it after Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who created the periodic table, a gesture that was considered bold during the Cold War. Mendelevium is a radioactive, synthetic metal, and its isotopes survive for at most a few weeks, so it has no practical uses outside research.

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