Question about the development of the “Superman” story?

Question

A serious question for fans of the Superman magazine series:

Krypton is a chemical element with the symbol Kr and atomic number 36.Krypton was discovered in Great Britain, 1898 by Sir William Ramsay and Morris Travers.

Superman is a fictional comic book superhero created in 1932 by American writer Jerry Siegel and Canadian-born artist Joe Shuster.

Did the creators knowingly borrow the name “Krypton” and “kryptonite”, or did they apropriate the term serendipitously?

Answer 1

From what I remember of the History channel documentary the creators of Superman used the element as the name because they thought it sounded alien and at the time the table of elements were not widely known.

Answer 2

The date is actually, May 30, 1898 and Sir William Ramsey was a Scottish chemist. No one else is credited with the discoverey. The Superman creators didn't borrow the name kryptoniote from anyone. The name sounded great. The creators didn't know there was kryptonite at the time.

Answer 3

In addition to what everybody else has already said, it’s possible, likely even, that there is an unacknowledged debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, and John Carter of Mars. John Carter was an Earthman, teleported to Mars, who discovered that due to his Earth muscles and the lower gravity of Mars, he could jump hundreds of feet in a single bound (the same way that Superman could not originally fly, but only leap.)

John Carter eventually became prince of Helium, the largest city of Mars and capital of his growing empire. Since Siegel and Schuster could not name an Earth city for an element (helium is also an inert gas, by the way), they might as well have named Superman’s homeworld for another noble gas.

By the time Superman was created, the Tarzan and John Carter stories had been in print for years. They probably didn’t want to look like they were ripping off one of the best known pulp-fiction writers of the day. I don’t accuse them, I merely point out the similarities.

Later on, DC comics had still another hero, Adam Strange, whose resemblance to John Carter was striking. Adam teleported back and forth between Earth and his adopted planet Rann, where he was always having to face emergencies and fight menaces, and never got a chance to spend a little private time with his girlfriend, the beautiful Alanna.. This was in the 60’s, after Edgar Rice Burroughs was deceased.

8 JAN 07, 1404 hrs, GMT.

Answer 4

This is all I could find:

"There is no relationship between kryptonite and the chemical element krypton, though Superman's home world was probably named after the element."

I think they probably borrowed it too.