2012 Merchandise & Miscellaneous News Archives

May 30, 2012: Krypton Discovered on This Day in 1898

Kryptonite Wired.com has re-published an old article on the anniversary of the day Krypton was discovered. No, not the fictional planet of Superman's ancestors, but the element discovered by two British scientists in 1898.

    Because they had suspected its presence, but had to look for it by removing [water, oxygen, nitrogen, helium and argon], Ramsay and Travers gave the element with atomic number 36 the name krypton, from the Greek kryptos for hidden (think cryptography or encryption).

    When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in Action Comics No. 1 (published June 1938), they named their superhero's home planet after the chemical element discovered 40 years earlier. Retellings of Superman's origins place his arrival on Earth around the time of World War I, a mere 20 years after Ramsay and Traver's discovery of krypton.

Read the complete article at Wired.com.



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