Nuclear chemist
Bernard G. Harvey
Bernard Harvey was a member of the Berkeley team that made mendelevium in 1955, the first element discovered one atom at a time.
How Mendelevium was found
The team had about a billion atoms of einsteinium, an invisible speck, which they bombarded with helium ions. They expected at most one atom of element 101 per experiment.
Harvey helped develop the technique of catching the recoiling atoms on a gold foil, which could then be dissolved quickly and passed through ion-exchange columns. Over several runs they detected 17 atoms. The element was named after Dmitri Mendeleev.
Shared the credit
The discovery is credited jointly to these scientists.
Life and career
Harvey worked at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, where he later turned to nuclear reaction studies with the laboratory’s cyclotrons.
Discovered in the same era
Other elements identified within ten years of 1955.