Mendelevium [SEP] time of discovery
life of 51 days; nevertheless, the shorter-lived Md (half-life 1.17 hours) is most commonly used in chemistry because it can be produced on a larger scale.
Mendelevium was discovered by bombarding einsteinium with alpha particles in 1955, the same method still used to produce it today. It was named after Dmitri Mendeleev, father of the periodic table of the chemical elements. Using available microgram quantities of the isotope einsteinium-253, over a million mendelevium atoms may be produced each hour. The chemistry of
the University of California, Berkeley. The team produced Md (half-life of 77 minutes) when they bombarded an Es target consisting of only a billion (10) einsteinium atoms with alpha particles (helium nuclei) in the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory's 60-inch cyclotron, thus increasing the target's atomic number by two. Md thus became the first isotope of any element to be synthesized one atom at a time. In total, seventeen mendelevium atoms were produced. This discovery was part of a program, begun in 1952,