Chemical element "Sb" (stibium) for antimony. Chemical symbols are understood internationally when element names might require translation. There have sometimes been differences in the past. For example, Germans in the past have used "J" (for the alternate name Jod) for iodine, but now use "I" and "Iod". The first letter of a chemical symbol is always capitalized, as in the preceding examples, and the subsequent letters, if any, are always lower case (small letters). Thus, the symbols for californium and einsteinium are Cf and Es. There are also symbols in chemical equations for groups of chemical elements, for example in comparative formulas.
Californium Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, started producing small batches of californium in the 1960s. By 1995, the HFIR nominally produced of californium annually. Plutonium supplied by the United Kingdom to the United States under the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement was used for californium production. The Atomic Energy Commission sold californium-252 to industrial and academic customers in the early 1970s for $10 per microgram and an average of of californium-252 were shipped each year from 1970 to 1990. Californium metal was first prepared in 1974 by Haire and Baybarz who reduced californium(III) oxide with lanthanum metal