Germanium

Germanium was discovered in 1886 by the German chemist Clemens Winkler, who isolated it from the mineral argyrodite. He named it after his homeland, Germany (Latin Germania). Germanium is a hard, greyish, brittle metalloid whose semiconducting properties made it the material of the first transistors in the late 1940s, before silicon largely displaced it; it remains important in fibre optics and infrared optics.

The semiconductor of the first transistors, germanium now serves chiefly in fibre-optic cable, in the infrared lenses of night-vision and thermal-imaging equipment, and as a catalyst, and it is recovered largely as a by-product of zinc refining. The first working transistor, built at Bell Labs in December 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, used a germanium crystal, and the trio shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention that founded modern electronics, before silicon's cheaper abundance and better high-temperature performance displaced germanium through the 1950s and 60s. The element later acquired an unrelated and discredited reputation in alternative medicine: organogermanium compounds were marketed from the 1970s, especially in Japan, as an energy-boosting health supplement, until case reports of serious kidney damage and several deaths led health authorities to warn against the products.

Germanium is the most striking of the three confirmations of Mendeleev's periodic law. In 1871 Mendeleev had predicted an element to fill the gap below silicon, naming it eka-silicon and forecasting its atomic weight, density, colour, oxide and even the properties of its chloride with remarkable precision. When Winkler analysed germanium fifteen years later, the match was so close, point by point, that it silenced lingering doubts about whether the periodic table was a real law of nature or a convenient chart. Coming after gallium and scandium, germanium turned prediction into proof, and Winkler himself recognised his new element as the long-awaited eka-silicon.

Winkler briefly considered naming his new element neptunium, since he thought it might correspond to a metal a rival chemist, R. Hermann, had wrongly claimed to detect in 1877 and had named for the planet found three decades earlier, before realising his sample matched Mendeleev's eka-silicon far more precisely and settling on Germania in patriotic homage to his homeland, only recently unified in 1871. The real element neptunium would not be discovered for another fifty years, leaving Winkler's discarded name to a very different, radioactive part of the periodic table. His choice joined gallium (France) and, later, ruthenium (Russia) and polonium (Poland) in the small set of elements named directly for a nation.