Elementymology & Elements Multidict

memory peg	Artificial radioactive metal melting point 640 °C; 1184 °F boiling point est. 3902 °C; est. 7056 °F density 20.25 g/cc; 1264.17 pounds/cubic foot
1940 Edwin M. McMillan and Philip Abelson, Berkeley, Calif., USA
Neptunus, planet, named after the Roman god of the sea

The element was was first prepared in 1940 by Edwin M. McMillan and Philip Abelson at the Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California by irradiation of Uranium with neutrons.

The first element following Uranium is named after the first planet after Uranus: Neptune.
The planet is named after the Roman god of the sea, Neptunus (see below).

Element #93 has got in 1934-38 the preliminary name Eka-Rhenium by Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann in Germany, who thought they had found traces of several transuranium elements. In December of 1938, Hahn and Strassmann found out that these radioactivities were not due to transuranium elements but were due to fission products. According to the Periodic Table of that time, without the Actinide series, element #93 is below Rhenium (#75). According to the present Table, Eka-Rhenium would be #107.

Bohemium & Sequanium (note)

In 1934 the engineer Odolen Koblic (1897-ca.1959), after he processed pitchblende from Jàchymov, in Czechoslovakia, concluded that element 93 was present in it. In summer 1934 Koblic published a short communication in which he stated "All the researches confirm my success in isolating the element of atomic number 93, to whom I give the name Bohemium (Bo) in honour to my fatherland.". Four years later, in 1938, Horia Hulubei (1896-1972) and Yvette Cauchois (1908-1999) extracted from some minerals from Madagascar element 93. They announced it as follows: "Nous aimerions que, si l'existence de cet élément 93 est confirmée, on le nommât Sequanium (Sq), en l'hommage à la vaillante et généreuse civilisation qui a fleuri sur les bordes de la Seine". The Latin name for the Seine is Sequana, thus the element should be named after Cauchois' fatherland - she was born in Paris -, as the element 87 Moldavium (see Francium) was named after Hulubei's fatherland

Ausonium & Hesperium

In 1934, Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) and his co-workers, Edoardo Amaldi (1908-1989), Oscar D'Agostino (1901-1975), Emilio Segrè (1905-1989), and Franco Rasetti (1901-2001), at the University of Rome, bombarded Uranium with neutrons and believed to have synthesized the first transuranium elements. The Dean of the Faculty of Rome, Orso Mario Corbino (1876-1937), announced the discovery of the elements 93 and 94 and he gave prematurely the names and symbols Ausonium, Ao, after Ausonia, the poetic name of Italy, and Hesperium (Esperio), Es (#94), from Hesperius, the Western country (Italy, seen from Greece). The fascist regime of Italy forced him to call one of these elements Littorio (Littorium, after the Italian "littorio", an Imperial Roman symbol re-used during the dictatorship, sometimes this word is associated with the regime itself). Corbino sarcastically replied that it was unlucky for the regime to be associated with an element with half life of few seconds... so the names remained Ausonium and Hesperium (note).

Fermi described this discovery in his Nobel lecture of 1938. Within weeks of the Nobel ceremony, the discovery of nuclear fission was announced. Uranium had been split virtually in half and Fermi's supposed new elements were actually Barium (56) and a mix of Krypton (36) and other elements of similar weight (note) (note2).

For an older Neptunium, see Niobium and Germanium.

Neptune is associated with fresh water, as opposed to Oceanus, god of the world-ocean. Like Poseidon, Neptune was also worshipped by the Romans as a god of horses, under the name "Neptune Equester," patron of horse-racing. The planet Neptune was named after the god, as its deep blue gas clouds gave early astronomers the impression of great oceans (note).

Neptune is the eighth planet from the Sun in our Solar System and is named for the Roman god of the sea. Discovered on September 23, 1846, Neptune was the first planet found by mathematical prediction rather than by empirical observation. Unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led Alexis Bouvard to deduce that its orbit was subject to gravitational perturbation by an unknown planet. Neptune was subsequently observed by Johann Galle within a degree of the position predicted by Urbain Le Verrier.

Shortly after its discovery, Neptune was referred to simply as "the planet exterior to Uranus" or as "Le Verrier's planet". The first suggestion for a name came from Galle, who proposed the name Janus. In England, Challis put forward the name Oceanus. Claiming the right to name his discovery, Le Verrier quickly proposed the name Neptune for this new planet, while falsely stating that this had been officially approved by the French Bureau des Longitudes. In October, he sought to name the planet Le Verrier, after himself, and he had loyal support in this from the observatory director, François Arago. However, this suggestion met with stiff resistance outside France. French almanacs quickly reintroduced the name Herschel for Uranus, after that planet's discoverer Sir William Herschel, and Leverrier for the new planet. Struve came out in favour of the name Neptune on December 29, 1846, to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Soon Neptune became the internationally accepted name. The demand for a mythological name seemed to be in keeping with the nomenclature of the other planets, all of which, except for Earth, were named for Greek and Roman mythology (note).

• Mary Elvira Weeks, Discovery of the Elements, comp. rev. by Henry M. Leicester (Easton, Pa.: Journal of Chemical Education, 1968), pp. 840-842.
• Earl K. Hyde & Glenn T. Seaborg, Transurane : Teil A 1, I: Die Elemente. Gmelins Handbuch der anorganische Chemie, Ergänzungswerk zur 8. Aufl.; Band 7a. Weinheim/Bergstrasse: Chemie, 1973.
• Glenn T. Seaborg, Early History of LBNL, A transcript of the lecture on the 65th Anniversary of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, August 26, 1996 (on-line).
• Darleane C. Hoffman, Albert Ghiorso & Glenn T. Seaborg, The Transuranium People: The Inside Story. Singapore [etc.]: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2000 (on-line information).
• Enrico Fermi, Artificial radioactivity produced by neutron bombardment. Nobel Lecture, 12 December 1938 (on-line PDF-file).