Vulcānus

Vulcanus—Vulcan in English—was the Roman god of fire, metalworking, and the forge. His Greek equivalent was Hephaestus, the only Olympian who was physically imperfect: lame from birth, thrown from Mount Olympus by his own mother Hera. The Romans placed Vulcan's workshop beneath Mount Etna in Sicily, where the smoke and rumbling were explained as the god hammering at his anvil. When the mountain erupted, Vulcan was working overtime.

The island of Vulcano, in the Aeolian archipelago north of Sicily, was believed to be another chimney of Vulcan's forge. The island's name was already in use by the 2nd century BCE. When Pliny the Elder wrote his Natural History around 77 CE, he described Vulcano's eruptions as evidence of divine industry. The specific island name was not yet a generic term for all erupting mountains.

That generalization happened gradually. By the late medieval period, European scholars began applying vulcano to any mountain that belched fire and rock. The word entered English as volcano in the 1610s, during a period of intense scientific interest in natural phenomena. The connection to the god faded as geology replaced mythology. By the time volcanology was established as a discipline in the 1800s, Vulcan had been fully evicted from his own word.

NASA named its hypothetical planet Vulcan—thought to orbit inside Mercury—after the same god, though the planet turned out not to exist. Star Trek borrowed the name for Spock's homeworld. The word vulcanize, coined in 1846 for the process of hardening rubber with heat, invokes the god's mastery of fire. A lame blacksmith's legend is embedded in geology, chemistry, science fiction, and the rubber on your tires.