Named for the Fire-Bringer

The name promethium was suggested by Grace Mary Coryell, wife of one of the discoverers, after Prometheus, the Titan of Greek myth who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humankind, and who was punished by Zeus with eternal torment for the gift. The choice was deliberate and pointed: the element had been wrested from the fission of uranium, the very process that had produced the atomic bomb, and Prometheus stood for both the promise and the peril of the fire that science had now stolen from the atom. Promethium thus carries one of the most consciously symbolic names in the periodic table, its mythological fire-theft made to speak for the dawning nuclear age.

By some accounts the name was proposed after Grace Mary Coryell challenged the discovery team, who had considered more conventional geographic options, to choose something that reflected the moral weight of what nuclear fission had just made possible, and Prometheus's story of stolen fire and its punishment fit that challenge more pointedly than any place name could have. At any given moment only about half a kilogram of promethium exists naturally in the whole of the Earth's crust, trace amounts produced by the spontaneous fission of uranium in ordinary rock and decaying away almost as fast as they form.