Extending the Tabe, Expanding the Cold War

     In 1950, "a notice turned up in the New Yorker's gossipy "Talk of the Town" section" that criticized how scientists were naming elements like berkelium, after Berkeley, and californium, after California. The same scientists had even outdone the supernova by creating more than the natural 92 elements. One scientist, named Glenn Seaborg, created the first transuranic element, neptunim, along with colleague Edwin McMillan. McMillan finally realized that element 93 might decay into element 94. However, soon after he was sent to work on scientific military projects, leaving Seaborg alone with everything. So, he joined up with a colleague and created element 94, plutonium, based on how McMillan had planned to complete the task. Seaborg was then summoned to Chicago in 1942 for the Manhattan Project. Afterwards, he joined up with technician Al Ghiorso and together they "discovered more elements than anyone in history and extended the periodic table by almost one-sixth." They did this by bombarding plutonium with radioactive particles - alpha particles made up of two protons and two neutrons. They discovered americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, and fermiun. When finding element 101, they had difficulties getting a large enough sample of number 99 to spray with alpha particles. After they achieved this, they had to look at what was left over after the atoms disintegrated. To detect the element, they had to run the sample to another lab miles away. After countless times, their strategy finally worked and they detected an exploding atom of element 101. They named it mendelevium and they also found element 102, nobelium, and 103, lawrencium.
     At this point, the elements were getting to big and 'uneasy' to get shot with alpha particles. Scientists from Russia tried fusing lighter elements together, after a lot of time was spent on calculating the best pairs to experiment with. Finally, Russia beat the team of Seaborg and Ghiorso to creating element 104. Seaborg and Ghiorso dismissed the results as "premature and sketchy" and they created 104 themselves. By 1969 they had it created, but by then Russia had already created 105. Both teams eventually go on the same level and created element 106 in 1974, just months apart. Then, each team started naming their own elements, a dispute that lasted until the 1990s. At this point, a point a team from West Germany had started claiming new elements. Finally, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry stepped in to arbitrate. After nine scientists were sent to each lab to investigate, they announced each team had to share credit for the elements (the same men who named elements 104-109.) Berkeley was angered they deleted seaborgium (106) from the list and protested it to change. When the final list came out it consisted of rutherfordium (104), dubnium (105), seaborgium (106), borhium (107), hassium (108), and meitherium (109).
     By the 1990s, Berkeley was lagging behind and after the Germans got elements 110, 111, and 112, Berkeley hired a Bulgarian named Victor Ninov away from the Germans. He had claimed to have made element 118 while working for Berkeley, but when it got out that he supplied false information, he was fired. However, in 1006, "an international team announced that after smashing ten billion billion calcium atoms into a californium target, they had produced three atoms of element 118." It still has to be proven, but there's no reason to think it won't hold up.

The following picture is of Glenn Seaborg pointing to the element named after him, element 106.