A New Element

For five years, Dr. B. Smith Hopkins, professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Illinois, had been searching through a gathering of old friends and nodding acquaintances to discover one of five strangers that reason told him must be present. It was a rather large gathering, 92 individuals by hypothetical count. He had them all assembled in the university's rare earths laboratory, and his procedure was to isolate them one by one, scrutinize them closely, and put them to one side positively identified as Oxygen, Gold, Barium, Chlorine, etc., etc.-old friends-or as Ytterbium, Lutecium, Praseodymium, etc., etc.-individuals that are rarely seen and have been introduced to science comparatively recently.

When he came to scrutinize Nos. 60 and 62, two metallic members of the gathering, named Neodymium and Samarium respectively, he detected a presence fainty visible between them. Bringing them further out into the open-he was working with X-rays and used delicate refining methods to isolate the two metals that he wished to examine more closely-he clearly beheld this intervening shadow. It appeared in the wavelength spectra of Nos. 60 and 62 as a line that belonged to neither yet was identical in both. Forthwith, though he had no lump of new metal in his hand, he was able to announce that be had discovered Element No. 61-one of the five unknowns predicted by Science's periodic arrangement of all the 92 elements.*

All matter is composed of electric particles. The new element is not a mysterious, incalculable new kind of matter, but an arrangement of protons and electrons different from all other arrangements. Dr. Hopkins gave it no name for the time being, just no name for the time being, just No. 61./- He knew that it was metallic; that its atomic weight would prove to be between 144.3 and 150.4 (the weights of 60 and 62). But he could not demonstrate its properties, uses, value, having only a trace of it in the half-ounce morsel to which he had reduced his original 400 pounds of rare earth ores in his search. Scientists hailed him, particularly his countrymen. Though laboratories throughout the world are constantly searching for the remaining unknown elements, no other elemental discovery has been made since Hafnium, No. 72, in 1923, at Copenhagen, by Chemists Coster and Hevesy. And never before has a new element been first discovered in a U. S. laboratory. It may well mean for Dr. Hopkins, they said, the $40,000 Nobel chemistry prize in 1926, an honor won by no other U. S. chemist save Professor Theodore Richards in 1914 for work on atomic weights.

* About 60 years ago, it was found that the elements can be arranged by their atomic weights in a rectangular table such that kindred elements fall under one another in fairly regular columns spaced approximately in correspondence with their varying family properties. The pattern of this table is so definite that units missing from it were predicted-as to atomic weights and properties-and the predictions later verified by discoveries. It is so definite that the number of possible elements was fixed by it at 92. Yet this periodic table is not absolutely satisfactory; one or two of the elements have to be warped into their theoretic positions. Undoubtedly some unknown factor operates to make the warping necessary. The table begins, in the upper left-hand corner, with hydrogen, leaving space for no lighter element. It is interesting to recall that the Russian, Mendeleeff, who was one of the discoverers of the table (1869) and by its aid a most successful prophet of new elements, predicted later that two elements lighter than hydrogen would some day be found, component gases of the extraterrestrial, inter-material "ether." No such element has yet been found, but last autumn Capt. T. J. J. See, of the Mare Island (Calif.) naval base, proposed, on a basis of known facts about atomic structure, the existence and properties of a "world gas" 47 billion times less dense than hydrogen, with particles 4,000 times smaller than hydrogen molecules (TIME. Oct. 12).

/- It was suggested that he name it Illinium after the place of discovery.