bohrium / nielsbohrium

Niels Bohr, 1922

17 March 2023

Bohrium. element 107, symbol Bh, is named for physicist Niels Bohr (1885–1962). The element was first synthesized in 1981 at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Institute for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany. But the discoverers originally proposed the name be nielsbohrium. And further complicating things, element 107 was not the first one for which Bohr was proposed as its namesake. Back in the 1970s, Russian researchers had proposed the name nielsbohrium for element 105.

Researchers at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research at Dubna in Russia synthesized element 105 in 1968, and in 1973 they proposed the name nielsbohrium at a conference in Hamburg, Germany:

Recent works of several Dubna groups on the transactinide and superheavy elements are reviewed. New experiments on the volatility properties of kurchatovium and nielsbohrium halides were performed. Some fast techniques, based on gas thermochromatography of volatile inorganic species, were developed for the chemical identification of elements beyond 105 as well as for the superheavy elements.

But in 1970, a team at the University of California, Berkeley independently synthesized the element and proposed the name hahnium, after German chemist Otto Hahn (1879–1968). Credit for the discovery and the naming of the element, therefore, became embroiled in Cold War politics. In 1997, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially credited both teams with the discovery, but officially named the element Dubnium.

In 1981, while the name for element 105 was up in the air, researchers at the Institute of Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany synthesized element 107, and in 1992 they proposed the name nielsbohrium. From Nature, 17 September 1992:

The heaviest known chemical elements—with half-lives of around 5 ms.—were finally named last week by scientists at the Institute of Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, where they were created by fusion reactions in the early 1980s. Element 107 is to be called nielsbohrium, after the atomic physicist Niels Bohr. Element 108, a fusion product of Pb208 and Fe58, is now hassium, named for the German state of Hessen, which supports the institute financially. Element 109–meitnerium—is a tribute to Lise Meitner, whose theoretical interpretation of Otto Hahn’s experiments was fundamental to the discovery of nuclear fission.

Unlike some previous attempts to name transuranic elements, this terminology is expected to be accepted by the international scientific community. During the cold war, element 104 was discovered concurrently in the Soviet Union and the United States, but debate continues on whether its name should be kurchatovium or rutherfordium, after the leading English and Soviet nuclear physicists of their time.

The naming was partially successful this time. In 1994, the IUPAC shortened the name to bohrium and gave it official status:

Elements 106 and 107 were named after Ernest Rutherford (New Zealand) and Niels Bohr (Denmark), respectively, to recognize their distinguished contributions to our knowledge of atomic structure. The Commission recommends the name Bohrium (Bh) for element 107, instead of the proposed Nielsbohrium, so that it conforms to the names of the other elements named after individuals.

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Sources:

“Names and Symbols of Transfermium Elements (IUPAC Recommendations 1994)” Pure and Applied Chemistry, 66.12, 2421.

“News in Brief.” Nature, 359.6392, 17 September 1992, 180. ProQuest.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. bohrium, n.; September 2003, s.v. nielsbohrium, n.

Zvara, I. “Studies of the Heaviest Elements at Dubna” (abstract). 24th NPAC Congress, Hamburg, 2 September 1973. OSTI.gov.

Photo credit: A. B. Lagrelius and Westphal, 1922, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W.F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates Collection. Public domain image.

blackmail

Poster for the 1929 Alfred Hitchcock film Blackmail, the first British “talkie”

15 March 2023

[16 March 2023: clarified the Norse origin]

Whence blackmail?

The mail in blackmail is unrelated to either a type of armor or the postal service. It comes from the Old Norse mál, whose root means discussion or agreement, although the English usage corresponds more closely to the Old Icelandic derivative máli meaning contract or payment. The Old English mal, meaning payment, first appears in reference to the Danegeld, cash given to Vikings to prevent them from raiding. The uncompounded word survives in Scots and northern English dialects.

Blackmail was first used to refer to protection rackets run by Scottish clan chieftains against farmers in their territory. If the farmers did not pay the mail, the chiefs would steal their crops and cattle. The black probably comes from the unsavory nature of the practice. The earliest record of the practice that I’m aware of is from the trial of one, Adam Scot, who was beheaded in 1530 for blackmailing the people of the Scottish-English border counties:

Maii 18.—ADAM SCOT of Tuschelaw, Convicted of art and part of theftuously taking Black-maill, from the time of his entry within the Castle of Edinburgh, in Ward, from John Brovne in Hoprow: And of art and part of theftuously taking Black-maill from Andrew Thorbrand and William his brother: And for art and part of theftuously taking of Black-maill from the poor Tenants of Hopcailʒow: And of art and part of theftuously taking Black-maill from the Tenants of Eschescheill.—BEHEADED.

Eventually, blackmail generalized to refer to obtaining payment through threat of force. A 1774 letter by David Hume makes jocular reference to blackmail, using it in the sense of being friendly to a scandalmonger in hopes that he will say nothing bad about him:

I think I can reckon about twenty people, not including the King, whom he has attacked in this short performance. I hope all his spleen is not exhausted. I should desire my compliments to him, were I not afraid that he would interpret the civility as paying blackmail to him.

But a clear use of blackmail to mean payment obtained through threat of force doesn’t appear until 15 December 1818, when it makes its appearance in a letter from a British officer stationed in India that is published in the Calcutta Journal and later the London Times the following year:

The Coolies were in some measure surprised […] the fellows have, however, received a lesson they will not easily forget, and whether we shall march or not is uncertain. They have long been the dread of all the country, and levied black mail in all directions.

And the sense of obtaining payment by threatening to publish scandalous information about someone, a sense that is hinted at Hume’s 1774 letter, does not make a clear appearance until the mid nineteenth century. From New York’s Evening Mirror of 22 May 1848, in reference to a rival paper:

Not a day passes that this organ of scoundrelism does not in some way insult the American people, who, we must admit, seem to take it very meekly—not to say gratefully. We wonder what chance of success a low, dirty, blackguard penny-a-liner would have who should go from this city to London to establish a paper for the purpose of abusing everything English and blackmailing theatres, artists and all persons who could be made to “bleed,” or suffer!

There is also an archaic, sense of blackmail, dating to the seventeenth century, referring to rent or other payments that are made in something other than silver coin, such as cattle or labor. This sense dates to the seventeenth century. Payment in silver coin was sometimes referred to as white rent, which is a folk etymology of quit-rent, from the Anglo-Norman quiterente, meaning a nominal payment to a lord in lieu of providing services. If one goes searching for early uses of blackmail, especially in English, as opposed to Scottish, sources, it is this sense that one is likely to find.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2017, s.v. quiterente, n. https://www.anglo-norman.net/entry/quiterente

Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, 1971, s.v. male, mail, n.1. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL).

“East-Indies.” Times (London), 16 July 1819, 2. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.

Hume, David. Letter to John Home, 4 Jun 1774. In J.Y.T. Greig, ed. The Letters of David Hume, Vol. 2: 1766–1776. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1932. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.

“In Perfect Keeping.” Evening Mirror (New York), 22 May 1848, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. blackmail, n., blackmail, v; June 2000, s.v. mail, n.1; March 2015, s.v. white, adj. (and adv.) and n.; December 2007, s.v. quit-rent, n.

Pitcairn, Robert. Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, vol. 1, part 1. Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1833, 145. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Scottish National Dictionary, 1941, s.v. black mail, n. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL).

Image credit: Wardour Films, 1929. Public domain image as published prior to 1977 without copyright notice.

bit / byte

13 March 2023

[Added reference to nibble on 15 March 2023.]

This website comes to you in bits and bytes. But what are bits and bytes and why are they called that?

A bit is a basic unit of information that represents one of two alternative states, typically written as a 1 or a 0. The term was coined by mathematician John Wilder Tukey c.1947 while he was working at Bell Labs and Princeton University in New Jersey. The term is a play on words. It is supposedly an abbreviated form of Binary digIT, but it is also so called because it is a small piece, or literally bit, of information. It may, in fact, be a backronym, that is an acronym created from an already existing word. Tukey and his colleagues may have started talking about bits of information, and later Tukey invented the acronym from the word.

The first known use of bit in print is in a 1948 article by Tukey’s colleague at Bell Labs, Claude Shannon. The article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, is a foundational text in the science of information theory, and its role in the history of the word bit is simply a footnote to the article’s scientific importance:

The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J.W. Tukey.

Byte appears around a decade later, and it too is a play on words, this time playing off of bit and bite/bite-size. A byte is a grouping of bits, typically but not necessarily eight bits, that is operated upon as a single unit. The letters of the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals can each be represented by a single byte. (Writing systems with more than 256 characters, such as Chinese, require two or more bytes to represent each character.)

The earliest use of byte in print that I have found is in a June 1959 paper presented at a conference and published in the IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers, although the wording here indicates the term was already in use:

For operations upon fields of variable length, it is generally necessary to specify the inner structure of the field. For alphabetic fields this consists of the individual letters or other characters. For numeric fields, the structure includes the sign, if any, and the digits, if separately encoded. These sub-units collectively have been named bytes. Since the coded representation of a byte naturally varies in size, byte sizes of one to eight bits may be specified and used.

In 1962, one of the authors of that paper, Werner Buchholz, edited a book on computer systems that expanded a bit on byte’s origin:

Byte denotes a group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character is used here because a given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and different codes may use different numbers of bits (i.e., different byte sizes). In input-output transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual characters. (The term is coined from bite, but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit.)

Nowadays, bytes are usually expressed in larger units designated with a prefix taken from Greek, such as kilobyte or terabyte:

• kilo- from χίλιοι (thousand); 1,024 bytes

• mega- from μεγα (great); 1,024 kilobytes

• giga- from γίγας (giant); 1,024 megabytes

• tera- from τέρας (monster); 1,024 terabytes

• peta- from penta- πέντε- (five) and tera-; 1,024 terabytes

• exa- from hexa- ἕξ (six); 1,024 petabytes

There is also the semi-humorous nibble or nybble referring to half a byte. That usage dates to at least 1967.

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Sources:

Brooks, Jr., F.P., G.A. Blaauw, and W. Buchholz. “Processing Data in Bits and Pieces.” IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers, EC-8.2, June 1959, 121. IEEEXplore.org.

Buchholz, Werner, ed. Planning a Computer System: Project Stretch. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962, 40. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bit, n.4, byte, n.; draft additions, 1993, s,v. bite, n.; third edition, September 2003, s.v. nibble, n.

Shannon, C.E. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Bell System Technical Journal, 27.3, July 1948, 380. IEEEXplore.org.

Image credit: Frank Carmody, 2016. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

bismuth

Bismuth in the form of a synthetic crystal; oxidation has given it a colorful patina

10 March 2023

Bismuth is a brittle, silvery-white metal which takes on a rosy tint through oxidation when exposed to air. It is atomic number 83 and uses the symbol Bi. Long thought to be the element with the highest atomic number that is not radioactive, it has been found that that its natural isotope, Bi-209, emits alpha particles, but its half-life exceeds the current age of the universe.

Bismuth is common in nature but for most of history was confused with lead or tin, a confusion that persisted into the eighteenth century. It was also believed by some to be an immature form of silver, called tectum argenti (hidden silver), that if left in the ground would become true silver.

The name comes from the Old High German Wismut or Wismuth, a term of uncertain origin, although the first element is very likely related to weiße (white). In the sixteenth century, minerologist Georgius Agricola Latinized the German name into bisemutium, from which the modern German and English names are derived. The English name bismuth is in place by the mid seventeenth century when it appears in a translation of German-Dutch alchemist Johann Rudolf Glaubner’s 1651 A Description of New Philosophical Furnaces:

It is not unknown to the diggers of minerals that sometimes there are immature minerals found which have neither gold nor silver in them, which being a little while exposed to the aire, and then being tryed yeeld gold and silver as wel in a greater as in a lesser proofe; such are Bismuth, Coboltum, Auripigmentum; and other Antimonial, and Arsenical minerals.

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Sources:

Glauber, Johann Rudolf. A Description of New Philosophical Furnaces. J.F.D.M., trans. London: Richard Coats for Thomas Williams, 1651, 365. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bismuth, n.

Weeks, Mary Elvira. “The Discovery of the Elements. II. Elements Known to the Alchemists.” Journal of Chemical Education, 9.1, January 1932, 15–16.

Big Apple

The Home Run Apple at the NY Mets’ Citi Field, Queens, New York

8 March 2023

New York City is known as the Big Apple. The nickname dates to the early twentieth century and arises out of a confluence of several discourses: Black slang, horse racing, the theater, and an older use of the phrase to refer to the stakes of a wager.

The use of big apple to refer to betting stakes is American, and perhaps specifically New England, slang dating to at least 1839. The following appears in Boston’s Saturday Morning Transcript of 16 March of that year:

The New York Courier says that Mr. CALHOUN will be the Special Ambassador to England, to settle the Boundary question. We will wager a big apple that Mr. Calhoun will not, and that Mr. WEBSTER will be the man. The President, and at least two members of the Cabinet, are strongly inclined to give the appointment to the Massachusetts Senator.

Other examples can be easily found. For instance, there is this from Boston’s Bay State Democrat of 30 December 1840:

Reader, we will bet you a big apple that you can’t read our correspondent’s letter from Salt River, without having your risible faculties affected “prodigiously!”

Or this from Massachusetts’s Salem Register of 23 December 1841

A little fellow came running into our office, a few mornings since, in hot haste for a newspaper. The paper hadn’t been left, and the reason he called for it was, “because Father couldn’t go to his work, and Mother couldn’t eat her breakfast till the paper came.” That boy will be a grand subscriber for somebody, we’ll wager a big apple. It is needless to add that his father always pays for this paper punctually.

And a big apple became associated with gambling on horseracing by 18 June 1842 when this appeared in New York’s The New World:

If it be discreditable to like a horse-race, there is one stain at least on my escutcheon[.] From the time I first learned to appreciate ambition and speed—two attributes, so common to our people—I have always yearned toward horses fleet of foot, and if I ever travel to bankruptcy (which Heaven avert) it will be on a fast horse. Yet gambling is detestable to me in every form—I never stake even “a big apple” on a contingency, and would prefer pauperism to wealth gained by luck.

The association of big apple with New York City can be traced to the following extended metaphor that appears in 1909’s The Wayfarer in New York. Here a big apple is something important, something that garners the most attention:

New York is merely one of the fruits of that great tree whose roots go down in the Mississippi Valley, and whose branches spread from one ocean to the other, but the tree has no great degree of affection for its fruit. It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap. It is disturbed by the enormous drawing power of a metropolis which constantly attracts to itself wealth and its possessors from all the lesser centers of the land. Every city, every State pays an annual tribute of men and of business to New York, and no State or city likes particularly to do it.

This sense gains a purchase in theater slang, and we see the following in the Chicago Defender of 28 October 1911. This appearance is doubly significant in that the Chicago Defender was a major Black newspaper, and the appearance marks its use in Black slang as well:

George Hayes and the Clancy Twins are the “big apple on the tree” this week. The twins can sing and their slang is the cutest stunt imaginable.

We next see big apple appear in several Defender columns by Billy Tucker in 1920. Tucker was a performer who wrote a column for the paper from Los Angeles titled Coast Dope. His column for 15 May 1920 makes a reference to L.A. as the Big Apple, using the term in reference to a big city but showing that it was not yet specifically associated with New York:

Dear Pal, Tony: No, Ragtime Billy Tucker hasn’t dropped completely out of existence, but is still in the “Big Apple.” Los Angeles. I want to tell the world and a half of Kankakee that a few weeks ago, when I told the Old Roll Top Desk Man that I could place entertainers and musicians in sunny California, I received a “zillion” letters from all over the United States, including Georgia.

Later that year, 16 September 1920, Tucker makes his first recorded reference to New York as the Big Apple:

Dear Pal, Tony: When your letter came last week I had already sent the “Coast Dope” in. I am awfully sorry that it didn’t come a day sooner. I trust your trip to “the big apple” (New York) was a huge success and only wish I had been able to make it with you, but they keep me too busy out here.

But what cemented the relationship between New York and the Big Apple is the writing of John J. Fitz Gerald, who wrote a racing column for that city’s Morning Telegraph. Fitz Gerald was especially fond of the term. He first uses it in his column for 3 May 1921:

J.P. Smith, with Tippity Witchet and others of the L.T. Bauer string, is scheduled to start for “the big apple” to-morrow after a most prosperous Spring campaign at Bowie and Havre de Grace.

And there is this from 1 April 1922:

B. Parke, the stable rider, is reputed a good 2-year-old rider, and the stable connections claim he is a gun away from the barrier. He will have the acid test put to him on “The Big Apple” within a few weeks.

On 18 February 1924, Fitz Gerald wrote on how the term came to his attention. It was used in a conversation he overheard between two New Orleans stable hands that probably occurred on 15 January 1920. Fitz Gerald’s reconstruction of the conversation is as follows:

The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.

———

Two dusky stable hands were leading a pair of thoroughbreds around the “cooling rings” of adjoining stables at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans and engaging in desultory conversation.

“Where y’all goin’ from here?” queried one.

“From here we’re headin’ for The Big Apple,” proudly replied the other.

“Well, you’d better fatten up them skinners or all you’ll get from the apple will be the core,” was the quick rejoinder.

And we see the following in the Tampa Sunday Tribune of 4 January 1925. This citation shows that the term had not only reached Florida by this date, but it had returned to theater circles—if it had ever left:

Angels are popularly supposed to have wings. Those of Broadway usually use theirs to fly away from the “Big Apple”—as it is sometimes called—but only after their wings have been prettily singed by some fascinating cutie whom they backed financially to the tune of many thousands.

After a while, the use of Big Apple declined until it was revived as a tourism slogan in the 1970s.

The Big Apple is a great example of how a phrase can circulate in multiple discourses, acquiring different meanings and connotations, before going “mainstream” and narrowing to a single, primary sense.

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Sources:

Credit for this one goes, first and foremost, to Barry Popik, who has relentlessly researched this phrase over the years.

Adams, Minnie. “Musical And Dramatic.” Chicago Defender, 28 October 1911, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Bay State Democrat (Boston, Massachusetts), 30 December 1840, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Fitz Gerald, John J. “Nevada Farm Has Fine Juveniles.” Morning Telegraph (New York), 1 April 1922, 8. Fultonhistory.com. (The Morning Telegraph is not, to my knowledge, digitized. The Fulton History site, however, has some select pages available, and transcripts of the many, if not most, of the early Big Apple uses in that paper can be seen at Barry Popik’s site.)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. Big Apple, n.

“Newspaper Readers of the Right Stamp.” Salem Register (Massachusetts), 23 December 1841, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. Big Apple, n.

Page, Will A. “Behind the Curtain of Broadway’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Trust.” Tampa Sunday Tribune (Florida), 4 January 1925, Magazine Section 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Popik, Barry. “Why is New York City Called the Big Apple?” Barrypopik.com, 5 July 2004.

Ramble, Lincoln. “The Course and the Race.” The New World (New York), 18 June 1842, 395. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Saturday Evening.” Saturday Morning Transcript (Boston, Massachusetts), 16 March 1839, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Tucker, Billy. “Coast Dope.” Chicago Defender, 15 May 1920, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “Coast Dope.” Chicago Defender, 16 September 1920, 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

The Wayfarer in New York. New York: Macmillan, 1909, xv. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Richiekim, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.