Born of the Hydrogen Bomb

Einsteinium's origin is among the most dramatic of any element: it was forged in the extreme neutron flux of a thermonuclear explosion, the November 1952 test that first demonstrated the hydrogen bomb, where uranium atoms rapidly absorbed many neutrons to build up heavy new nuclei. Because the discovery came from a secret weapons test, its announcement was delayed until 1955.

The element was named for Albert Einstein, whose famous equation relating mass and energy underlay the very nuclear physics that had created it, though Einstein, a lifelong advocate of peace, was an ironic patron for a substance born of a bomb. Einsteinium has no ancient or esoteric tradition, being a synthetic element of the atomic age; its story binds the name of the century's greatest physicist to the fire of the hydrogen bomb. Recovering even that first sample required specially equipped aircraft to fly through the radioactive cloud collecting debris on filter papers, from which chemists eventually isolated roughly 200 micrograms of the new element buried among tonnes of coral, seawater and fallout, an extraction effort as extraordinary in its own way as the explosion that had created the material in the first place.