The Elements That Nearly Had Other Names

Element 41 was called columbium for a century and a half. It was named that in 1801 by Charles Hatchett, working in London on a mineral specimen that had reached the British Museum from Connecticut, and the name honoured Columbia — the United States. Then in 1846 Heinrich Rose in Berlin, examining tantalum ores, concluded he had found something new and called it niobium, after Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus.

They were the same element. Both names stayed in circulation for the next hundred years, split almost exactly along the Atlantic: European journals said niobium, American journals said columbium. The dispute was formally settled at the Union of Chemistry's conference in Amsterdam in 1949, in favour of the name that came second by forty-five years.

It did not entirely take. The last American Chemical Society paper with columbium in its title appeared in 1953, and the US metals industry — which is a substantial buyer of the stuff for high-strength steel — still calls it columbium today. Element 41 is the clearest case in the table of a ratified name and a trade name coexisting for seventy years after the argument was supposedly over.

Two chemists, one element, and thirty years of national loyalty

Element 71 was isolated in 1907 by three people independently: Georges Urbain in Paris, Carl Auer von Welsbach in Austria, and Charles James in New Hampshire. James got there arguably first and did not press a claim. The other two did.

Urbain published first and proposed lutecium, after Lutetia, the Roman name for Paris. Welsbach proposed cassiopeium, after the constellation, with the symbol Cp. The International Commission on Atomic Weights awarded priority to Urbain in 1909, and the two men went on arguing about it for years afterwards.

The interesting part is what the rest of chemistry did with the ruling: German-language literature carried on printing cassiopeium for several decades regardless. The name was not really settled until the same 1949 conference that dealt with columbium, which also changed the spelling from lutecium to lutetium — so the winning name did not survive the process entirely intact either.

Sweet, and lifeless

Two of the oldest disputes were between a name describing a property and a name describing a mineral, and in both cases the mineral won in English and lost elsewhere.

Beryllium lost its first name to an objection about logic. Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin, who found the new earth in 1798, named it for the taste of its salts — glucine, giving glucinium and the symbol Gl. Martin Klaproth's counter was that sweetness does not distinguish anything, other elements having sweet compounds of their own, whereas a name taken from the mineral points at one substance and no other. Klaproth had the better argument and lost with it for a century and a half, because France went on printing glucinium in official chemistry out of habit and preference. IUPAC ended the double listing in 1949.

Nitrogen went the other way. Lavoisier called it azote, from the Greek for "no life", because a mouse in a jar of it does not survive — a name that describes the observation exactly. Jean-Antoine Chaptal's counter-proposal a few years later pointed at saltpetre instead, and the argument between them is really about what a name should record: what a gas does to a mouse, or what it can be made into. English went with the second and took nitrogen. Much of the rest of Europe went with the first, and azote is still the word taught there. Neither side ever conceded, and the symbol N is the only thing they agree on.

The transfermium wars

The longest and most political naming fight in chemistry ran from the 1960s to 1997 and concerned elements 104 to 109.

Berkeley and Dubna both claimed several of them, in a period when a Soviet and an American laboratory disputing priority was not purely a scientific matter. Berkeley proposed rutherfordium for 104 and hahnium for 105; Dubna proposed kurchatovium for 104 and nielsbohrium for 105. Both sets of names were in print, in textbooks, for thirty years, and which periodic table you learned from told you something about which country printed it.

IUPAC's attempted settlement in 1994 satisfied almost nobody. It proposed dubnium for 104, joliotium for 105 and rutherfordium for 106 — moving the American name up two places — and it rejected seaborgium outright on the grounds that Glenn Seaborg was still alive and elements should not be named for the living. The American Chemical Society reacted badly and simply carried on using its own list.

The final compromise, ratified in Geneva in 1997, redistributed the credit:

• 104 rutherfordium, with joint credit
• 105 dubnium, acknowledging Dubna's priority
• 106 seaborgium, with the living-person objection abandoned
• 107 bohrium, over the German proposal of nielsbohrium, because element names take a surname alone
• 108 hassium
• 109 meitnerium

Hahnium and kurchatovium disappeared from the table entirely. Joliotium never made it on. And seaborgium set the precedent that made oganesson possible twenty years later: only two elements have ever been named for a living person, and the first one had to fight for it.

A name for a discovery that did not happen

Nobelium is the strangest survivor. It was announced in 1957 by a group at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm, who proposed the name and the symbol No. The result could not be reproduced by anyone, including themselves, and the Stockholm claim was eventually abandoned. Berkeley and Dubna both went on to produce genuine element 102, and after decades of assessment IUPAC credited Dubna.

The name stayed. Element 102 is called nobelium because of an experiment that is no longer thought to have worked, in honour of an institute that did not discover it — kept, in the end, because it had been in the textbooks too long to dislodge.

Something similar happened one row down with radon. It spent a decade being called niton, symbol Nt, after being isolated by William Ramsay and Robert Whytlaw-Gray, and before that it was widely referred to as an "emanation" of radium rather than as an element in its own right. Radon was fixed as the name in 1923, and the earlier one now appears only in pre-war literature, where it is a reliable dating clue.

Two names still in daily use

Two elements never had a loser at all, in the sense that both names remain current.

Tungsten carries the symbol W from wolfram. IUPAC listed both names as acceptable until 2005, when wolfram was dropped from the official table — and the symbol, which comes from the discarded name, was left exactly where it was. German, Spanish, Swedish and Russian still use forms of wolfram.

Aluminum is the entry on this list where the argument was never resolved and nobody much minds. Humphry Davy went through three names for element 13 inside five years — alumium, then aluminum, then aluminium — and the last two both stuck, one on each side of the Atlantic. IUPAC's listing now carries aluminium as the international standard with aluminum recorded as an accepted variant, which leaves the two of them correct simultaneously. The element's own page has the chronology in full, down to the dictionary entry and the handbill that fixed American usage.

The reason it belongs at the end of this list is the consequence. Every other name here has a loser. This one does not, so the spelling on any given page is not a fact somebody looked up but a decision somebody had to take, and then keep taking. These pages take aluminum throughout, matching the reference that supplies their physical properties, and print aluminium only where the difference is itself the subject — as it is in this paragraph.

What the pattern says

Element names are settled by committee only where a committee existed. Everything before the twentieth century was decided by publication, national loyalty and stubbornness, and several of those arguments outlasted the people having them by fifty years.

The names that stuck are not reliably the earliest, the most descriptive or the most deserved. Columbium had priority and lost. Nobelium had nothing and won. What decided most of them was how long a name had been sitting in the textbooks by the time anyone tried to change it.