Bromine was discovered in 1826 by the young French chemist Antoine-Jerome Balard, who obtained it from the residues of seawater and sea salt; Carl Lowig had reached it independently. Its name comes from the Greek bromos, stench, chosen for the foul, penetrating odour of its dense reddish-brown vapour. Bromine is one of only two elements liquid at room temperature, the other being mercury, and belongs to the reactive halogen family. Denser than water and giving off a corrosive vapour, bromine and its compounds have been used in flame retardants, in agricultural fumigants, in photographic film and in some dyes and medicines, though a number of these uses have been curtailed on health and environmental grounds.
Potassium and sodium bromide salts were widely prescribed as sedatives and anticonvulsants from the mid nineteenth century into the twentieth, common enough that a bromide entered English as an idiom for a dull, soothing, unoriginal remark or platitude, a linguistic trace of the medicine cabinet that has long outlasted the drugs themselves, which were phased out after longer-term toxicity became clear. Today the Dead Sea, with one of the highest natural bromide concentrations on Earth, supplies a large share of the world's bromine through evaporation and extraction works on its Israeli and Jordanian shores.