Promethium - 61Pm: historical information
Earlt claims to the discovery of promethium date back to 1924 but these appear have been substantiated. A group at Ohio State University (USA) claimed element 61 in experiments involving its synthesis in a cyclotron, but again the evidence did not satisfy everyone. In 1947, Marinsky, Glendenin, and Coryell at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, made the first chemical identification of promethium by use of ion-exchange chromatography on residues in a nuclear reactor.