Science: Alabamium

Monday, Feb. 17, 1930

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Of the 92 elements which the late great Russian Dmitri Ivanovitch Mendelèeff (1834-1907) predicates with his Periodic Law, 16 have been discovered since 1894.* Two remain to be isolated—eka-iodine and eka-cesium.† Last week Dr. Fred Allison and Edgar Jackson Murphy of Alabama Polytechnic Institute at Auburn, Ala., reported that they had "evidence of considerable weight for the presence" of eka-cesium in certain salts they had reduced from lepidolite, a form of mica, and pollucite, a mineral consisting chiefly of cesium, aluminum and silicon. When they break down their salts they will get a soft silvery-white metal which will look and react much as do the alkali metals lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium and cesium. When eka-cesium is isolated, then Messrs. Allison & Murphy will have the pleasant problem of naming it. The recent tendency for such names has been after places—hafnium (1922) for Hafnia (Copenhagen), masurium (1924) for the Masurian Lakes, rhenium (1924) for the Rhine, illinium (1926) for Illinois. Hence, for eka-cesium, alabamium is appropriate for the state in which the discoverers work.

Eka-iodine, the other element yet to be isolated, belongs to the halogen group— with fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine.

^{*Since archaic times man has known and used carbon, sulfur,
gold and silver. He first used copper in Egypt about 4000 B. C. About
3500 B. C. he found iron, and, somewhat later, lead. The Chaldaeans
used tin 3500 years ago.
†Eka, Sanskrit for one or first, is a
prefix applied to the first undiscovered element in a group of the
periodic system.}