Overview

Einsteinium was discovered in 1952, not in a laboratory but in the fallout of the first hydrogen-bomb test, code-named Ivy Mike, in the Pacific; it was identified by a team led by Albert Ghiorso from the debris, and its existence was kept secret for several years. It was named after Albert Einstein. Einsteinium is a soft, silvery, intensely radioactive metal, made only in minute amounts and studied purely as a subject of research. Produced in vanishingly small quantities in high-flux reactors, einsteinium has no use beyond pure science; even weighing and studying a few micrograms is a considerable feat, and it has served chiefly as a target in attempts to create still heavier elements, including mendelevium.

Einstein himself had no direct role in the weapons programme that inadvertently created the element bearing his name: his connection was the 1939 letter he co-signed to President Roosevelt, warning that Nazi Germany might be pursuing an atomic bomb and urging American research into the possibility, a letter that helped set the Manhattan Project in motion years before Ivy Mike's fallout produced the actual element named for him. Einstein reportedly had mixed feelings about that letter for the rest of his life, given the destructive uses the resulting research eventually enabled.