Uran

In 1789, the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth dissolved a heavy black mineral from the Joachimsthal mines in Bohemia and extracted a substance no one had seen before. He named it uranit, later uranium, in honor of the planet Uranus — itself discovered only eight years earlier by William Herschel in 1781. Klaproth was a compulsive namer who believed elements should bear grand titles. Uranus was named after the Greek god Ouranos (Οὐρανός), the primordial deity of the sky.

For 150 years, uranium was a curiosity. It was used to tint glass and color ceramic glazes — Fiestaware dishes from the 1930s contained uranium oxide that gave them their bright orange color. Marie Curie and Pierre Curie studied uranium's strange emissions in the 1890s and coined the word 'radioactivity.' But the element remained obscure, a scientific novelty with no military or industrial significance.

That changed on December 2, 1942, when Enrico Fermi achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in a converted squash court under the bleachers of the University of Chicago's football stadium. The Manhattan Project followed. On August 6, 1945, a uranium bomb called Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. An element named after the sky god became the destroyer of a city.

Klaproth could not have imagined what he named. He was a careful, methodical chemist who liked elegant nomenclature. The word uranium has since become synonymous with nuclear weapons, nuclear power, nuclear waste, nuclear anxiety — an entire vocabulary of existential dread attached to a name that originally meant nothing more than 'the planet element.' The sky god's name now carries the weight of everything that happened after 1945.