"Element No. 102" in Physical Review Letters. **Very first issue of the PRL!**

A. Ghiorso, T. Sikkeland, J. R. Walton, and G. T. Seaborg. "Element No. 102" in Physical Review Letters, vol 1 no. 1, 1 July 1958, pp 18-21 in the original issue. Wrappers. FINE copy save for the original owner's name in ink at the top right corner front wrapper. [++] "This Letter announced the first synthesis of an isotope of the transuranic element 102 and described a then-new technique to identify high-Z elements. A year earlier researchers at the Nobel Institute in Sweden had claimed to have discovered an isotope of this element with a 10-minute half-life and proposed the name nobelium for it [P. R. Fields et al., Phys. Rev. 107, 1460 (1957). This claim could not be confirmed, either by these authors at UC Berkeley [PRL 1, 17 (1958)] or by a group at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. The Dubna group did confirm the Berkeley group s work and further confirming experiments were done at Berkeley in 1966. The Berkeley group eventually got credit for the discovery and the right to name it, but recommended that the name nobelium be retained."--"Letters from the Past, a Fifty Year Retrospective" (online from the APS) [++] Albert Ghiorso was an American nuclear scientist and co-discoverer of a record 12 chemical elements on the periodic table. His research career spanned six decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1990s. "By the mid-1950s it had became clear that to extend the periodic chart any further, a new machine that could accelerate heavy ions would be needed, and the Berkeley Heavy Ion Accelerator (HILAC) was built, with Ghiorso in charge. That machine was used in the discovery of five more trans-Mendelevium elements, including elements 102 (Nobelium, 1958 59), 103 (Lawrencium, 1961), 104 (Rutherfordium, 1969), 105 (Hahnium, now renamed Dubnium, 1970), and 106 (Seaborgium, 1974). Each of these new elements was produced and identified on the basis of only a few atoms. Ghiorso brilliantly led the development of new techniques to reduce unwanted background and tease out the characteristic signals from the sought-for elements. His scientific creativeness and energetic devotion to the Berkeley program can only be described as a tour-de-force, resulting in 12 new elements over 30 years, an average of more than one new element every 3 years. With increasing atomic number, the experimental difficulties of producing and identifying a new element increase significantly. In the 1970s and 1980s, resources for new element search at Berkeley were diminishing, while support at other laboratories (GSI at Darmstadt, Germany and JINR at Dubna, Russia) was increasing. Soon the GSI group was able to synthesize elements 107-109, and in the early 1990s, the Berkeley and Darmstadt groups made a collaborative attempt to create element 110. Experiments at Berkeley were unsuccessful, but eventually element 110 was found by the GSI group, and later elements 111 and 112 were identified. Experiments at JINR successfully produced and identified elements 113-118, completing the fourth row of the periodic chart. Nearly all this work was based on techniques developed by Ghiorso at Berkeley. [++] In addition to the specific apparatus and techniques used in the experiments, he invented new accelerators for extending nuclear research. Around 1970 he conceived the joining of the HILAC and another major accelerator at Berkeley, the Bevatron. He called the combination the Bevalac; it provided ions at energies up to 2 Gev/n, enabling a wide and deep program of new physics research and medical treatment using high energy heavy ions. He also invented the Omnitron, which would have been able to accelerate any atom with variable energy. The machine was generally acknowledged as a brilliant leap, although the machine was never built due to funding limitations."-- Dr. Robert W. Schmieder , online obituary for the Berkeley Lab.…