The Last Element

The last of the elements to be identified was isolated last week. Ever since bearded Russian Professor Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleeff classified the probable chemical elements in 1869 and arranged them in the periodic table, scientists have looked for a fifth member of the halogen family: fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine. Now the hypothetical eka-iodine (i.e., next to iodine) has finally been isolated in Bern, Switzerland. Thus Mendeleeff's table has now been realized, substantially as he predicted, with 92 elements (unless there are others heavier than uranium, which chemists think unlikely).

Discoverers of the method of isolating eka-iodine are Dr. Walter Minder, director of Bern's Radium Institute, and Dr. Alice Leigh-Smith, British student of the late great Mme. Curie. In a burst of international patriotism they named the new element anglohelvetium after their native lands, as Mme. Curie named polonium for her Poland.

Two shadows fall on this decision: 1) the name may not stand, since the ending turn implies a metal, and the new element, like its relatives chlorine and iodine, is decidedly nonmetallic; 2) discovery of the new element has been previously claimed elsewhere.

In 1931 Dr. Fred Allison and his collaborators of Alabama Polytechnic Institute, applying a magneto-optic method of analysis, a thousand times more sensitive than the arc spectroscope, to the study of concentrates from monazite sand, believed they had two-millionths of a gram of eka-iodine in the final concentrate. They named it alabamine. Dr. Allison did not isolate it in pure form, nor were other chemists able to confirm his magneto-optic suspicion. The anglo-helvetian stars, however, may merely have fallen on alabamine.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.