Discovery of Curium
Dr. Doug Stewart
Curium was the third synthetic transuranium element of the actinide series to be discovered.
It was discovered by Glenn T. Seaborg, Ralph A.James, and Albert Ghiorso in 1944.
Curium-242 (half-life 162.8 days) was produced by bombarding plutonium-239 with alpha particles in the Berkeley, California, 60-inch cyclotron. Each nuclear reaction produced a neutron in addition to an atom of curium-242. (1)
The element was chemically identified at the metallurgical laboratory at the University of Chicago.
The researchers at first referred to curium as ‘delirium’ owing to the difficulties they encountered trying to isolate it from another new element with which it was very closely associated, americium – or ‘pandemonium’ as it was first called.
Visible amounts of curium-242, in the form of curium hydroxide, were first isolated by Louis Werner and Isadore Perlman of the University of California in 1947. Curium-242 was produced by bombarding americium-241 with slow moving neutrons for a year. (2)
In 1952, W. W. Crane, J. C. Wallmann, and Burris B. Cunningham prepared metallic curium for the first time at Berkeley, California. (3)
The element is named after Marie and Pierre Curie, who pioneered work on radioactivity and discovered radium and polonium.