1952: Einsteinium - The book of science

Einsteinium
Atomic number 99
Et al.
Commentary

Berkeley, Argonne, Los Alamos—Albert Ghiorso and co-workers at Berkeley, Argonne, and Los Alamos elements

Einsteinium

Very high instantaneous neutron flux
in the thermonuclear explosion of Ivy Mike on Enewetak Atoll
created numerous heavy actinide isotopes.
Albert Ghiorso had theorized that in such an explosion
as many as sixteen neutrons could be absorbed by uranium-238,
decaying to transcalifornium elements.
Ghiorso and his team analyzed materials
gathered by airflights through the mushroom cloud
and from fallout from the coral of a neighboring island.
They separated the actinides from the lanthanides
and found a 6.6-mega-electron-volt alpha emission from the actinide portion
that was not associated with any previous element.
The teams at the Berkeley and Argonne labs
performed ion-exchange elution separations to show
that the element with atomic number 99 had been created.

Atomic number 99

Albert Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc²,
in describing the equivalence of energy and mass,
suggested the potential of atomic energy; however,
a nuclear explosion resulting in either fission or fusion
doesn’t convert mass to energy in the sense
that uranium or deuterium are converted to energy; instead,
atomic binding energies are released
as heat and electromagnetic radiation,
and the mass, broken and fused, including
atoms of einsteinium and fermium, is scattered.

Et al.

Albert Ghiorso, Stanley G. Thompson,
Gary H. Higgins, and Glenn T. Seaborg
at the Radiation Laboratory and Department of Chemistry,
University of California, Berkeley, California,
Martin H. Studier, P. R. Fields,
Sherman M. Fried, H. Diamond, J. F. Mech, G. L. Pyle,
John R. Huizenga, A. Hirsch, and W. M. Manning
at Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinios,
C. I. Browne, H. Louise Smith, and R. W. Spence
at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory,
Los Alamos, New Mexico,
with thanks to H. F. Plank, A. Turkevich,
D. F. Peppard, George Mason, John Maier,
Richard Wallace, R A. Penneman, K. Street, Jr.,
W. W. T. Crane, L. R. Zumwalt, L. B. Werner,
N. E. Ballou, I. J. Russell, N. B. Garden,
Rosemary Barrett, and R. A. Glass.

Increasingly, discovery became a corporate effort. Each scientist with his or her specialization joined a larger team whose members preform many roles.