Roentgenium isn’t the sort of element you’ll find just anywhere. In fact, only a few molecules of this element have ever been created!
In 1969, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States tried to find elements 110 to 114 in mineral samples. Despite all their searching, they turned up empty-handed. In the mid-1980s, scientists at the Russian Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (better known as JINR) tried to make element 111 by bombarding bismuth-290 with nickel-64. The idea was that by fusing the nuclei of the two atoms, a new element would result. But they weren't successful either. In 1994, a team of 13 physicists at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, succeeded in making a few atoms of element 111 using the same process that the JINR team had tried.
After its discovery, the new element was given the temporary name unununium, based on the Latin roots for its atomic number. Ten years later, in 2004, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry accepted a name for the element proposed by the Darmstadt team: roentgenium, after Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, the German physicist who discovered the x-ray in 1895.