The search for new elements is something that scientists have been doing for hundreds of years. Once Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev organised the elements known at his time according to a repeating, or periodic (and hence the name periodic table), system in the 1860s, the search became a little easier.
This was because the gaps in Mendeleev’s periodic table pointed to elements that weren’t known yet. The properties of these elements, however, could be predicted based on their place in the table and the neighbours around them, thereby making it easier to discover new elements. Mendeleev’s table has since been expanded, to make space for other new elements.
One of those new elements discovered was element number 101, named mendelevium after Mendeleev. American Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seaborg, who was one of the discoverers of the element, wrote that the discovery of mendelevium was “one of the most dramatic in the sequence of syntheses of transuranium elements”, in a chapter co-written by him for The New Chemistry. Additionally, he also wrote in that chapter that “It was the first case in which a new element was produced and identified one atom at a time.”
