 Discovery Information
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| Who: G.T.Seaborg, S.G.Tompson, A. Ghiorso, K.Street Jr.
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| When: 1955 |
| Where: United States |
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| Name Origin
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| After the scientist Dmitri Ivanovitch Mendeleyev, who devised the periodic table.
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| "Mendelevium" in different languages. |
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| Sources
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| Purely synthetic element. Made by bombarding einsteinium with helium ions.
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| Uses
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| There are no uses of mendelevium and only trace amounts of the element have ever been produced. |
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| History
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| Mendelevium (for Dmitri Mendeleev, surname commonly spelt as Mendeleev, Mendeleef, or even Mendelejeff, and first name sometimes
spelt as Dmitry or Dmitriy) was first synthesized by Albert Ghiorso (team leader), Glenn T. Seaborg, Bernard Harvey, Greg Choppin, and Stanley G. Thompson in early 1955 at the University of
California, Berkeley. The team produced 256Md (half-life of 76 minutes) when they bombarded an 253Es target with alpha particles (helium nuclei) in the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory's 60-inch cyclotron (256Md was the first element to be synthesized one-atom-at-a-time). Element 101 was the ninth transuranic element synthesized.
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| Notes
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| 15 radioisotopes of mendelevium have been characterized, with the most stable being 258Md with a half-life of 51.5 days, 260Md with a half-life of 31.8 days, and 257Md with a half-life of 5.52 hours. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 97 minutes, and the majority of these have half-lifes that are less than 5 minutes.
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