Rhenium closes a long chapter: it was the final element possessing a stable isotope to be discovered occurring naturally on Earth, all later additions to the periodic table being either radioactive or wholly synthetic. Its name is a plain geographical tribute to the Rhine, the great river of the German lands where its discoverers worked, one of the cluster of elements named for the homelands of their finders.
Ida Tacke, later Ida Noddack, who shared in the discovery, is also remembered for being among the first to suggest, years ahead of its acceptance, the possibility of nuclear fission. Rhenium has no ancient or esoteric tradition, being a twentieth-century discovery; its distinction is to mark the end of the search for stable elements in the natural world. The same team also claimed, controversially, to have detected element 43 in their samples, proposing the name masurium, but unlike rhenium this claim was never independently confirmed and is not accepted by the scientific community; element 43, technetium, was only genuinely produced artificially in 1937, and the Noddack-Tacke-Berg masurium claim remains one of the periodic table's disputed near-misses rather than an accepted discovery.