In 1955, the same team from the University of California, Berkeley, that discovered many of the actinides (Albert Ghiorso, Glenn Seaborg, Greg Choppin, Bernard Harvey, and Stanley Thompson) were bombarding an einsteinium-253 target with alpha particles (two protons and two neutrons, like helium without the electrons) in the 60-inch cyclotron. They produced seventeen atoms of mendelevium-256. This discovery was part of a program that started in 1952 that bombarded plutonium with neutrons to change it into heavier actinides. This process came about because the previous method of using neutron capture was not working. Because the short half-lives of fermium isotopes limited the success of the neutron capture process, they could not produce isotopes of mendelevium through that method.
The team decided that because it was the first of the second hundred chemical elements, the new element would be named after Dmitri Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table. Because the discovery happened during the Cold War, Seaborg had to get permission from the US government to propose naming the element after a Russian.