Overview

Roentgenium was first created in 1994 at the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt by a team led by Sigurd Hofmann, by fusing bismuth and nickel nuclei. It was named after Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, the German physicist who discovered X-rays. Roentgenium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, known only from a handful of atoms that survive for a tiny fraction of a second. It has no studied chemistry and is expected to lie beneath gold in the table; each atom is detected only through the chain of decays it produces, and making even a few has demanded months of accelerator time.

Roentgen stumbled on his discovery by accident in November 1895, noticing that a screen coated with barium platinocyanide glowed faintly across the room whenever he ran current through a nearby cathode-ray tube, even with the tube wrapped in black paper; he called the unknown radiation X-rays, X for unknown, and within weeks produced the first medical radiograph ever made, an image of his wife Anna Bertha's hand, whose bones and wedding ring she reportedly found so unsettling to see that she is said to have exclaimed she had seen her own death. The image, and the sensation it caused when published, made Roentgen instantly world-famous and helped X-ray imaging spread into hospitals within just a few years of the discovery.