text: As early as 1914, the possible existence of superheavy elements with atomic numbers well beyond that of uranium—then the heaviest known element—was suggested, when German physicist Richard Swinne proposed that superheavy elements around Z = 108 were a source of radiation in cosmic rays. Although he did not make any definitive observations, he hypothesized in 1931 that transuranium elements around Z = 100 or Z = 108 may be relatively long-lived and possibly exist in nature. In 1955, American physicist John Archibald Wheeler also proposed the existence of these elements; he is credited with the first usage of the term "superheavy element" in a 1958 paper published with Frederick Werner. This idea did not attract wide interest until a decade later, after improvements in the nuclear shell model. In this model, the atomic nucleus is built up in "shells", analogous to electron shells in atoms. Independently of each other, neutrons and protons have energy levels that are normally close together, but after a given shell is filled, it takes substantially more energy to start filling the next. Thus, the binding energy per nucleon reaches a local maximum and nuclei with filled shells are more stable than those without. This theory of a nuclear shell model originates in the 1930s, but it was not until 1949 that German physicists Maria Goeppert Mayer and Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen et al. independently devised the correct formulation.
  The numbers of nucleons for which shells are filled are called magic numbers. Magic numbers of 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 and 126 have been observed for neutrons, and the next number is predicted to be 184. Protons share the first six of these magic numbers, and 126 has been predicted as a magic proton number since the 1940s. Nuclides with a magic number of each—such as O (Z = 8, N = 8), Sn (Z = 50, N = 82), and Pb (Z = 82, N = 126)—are referred to as "doubly magic" and are more stable than nearby nuclides as a result of greater binding energies.
  In the late 1960s, more sophisticated shell models were formulated by American physicist William MyersFl (Z = 114, N = 184), rather than Ubh (Z = 126, N' = 184) which was predicted to be doubly magic as early as 1957. Subsequently, estimates of the proton magic number have ranged from 114 to 126, and there is still no consensus.