Darmstadtium was first created in November 1994 by the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in the city of Darmstadt, Germany, after which it was named.

Darmstadtium is calculated to have similar properties to its lighter homologues, nickel, palladium, and platinum.

[c] This fusion may occur as a result of the quantum effect in which nuclei can tunnel through electrostatic repulsion.

[21] The definition by the IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party (JWP) states that a chemical element can only be recognized as discovered if a nucleus of it has not decayed within 10−14 seconds.

This value was chosen as an estimate of how long it takes a nucleus to acquire electrons and thus display its chemical properties.

However, its range is very short; as nuclei become larger, its influence on the outermost nucleons (protons and neutrons) weakens.

[f] Almost all alpha emitters have over 210 nucleons,[34] and the lightest nuclide primarily undergoing spontaneous fission has 238.

[i] Spontaneous fission, however, produces various nuclei as products, so the original nuclide cannot be determined from its daughters.

[j] Darmstadtium was first discovered on November 9, 1994, at the Institute for Heavy Ion Research (Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung, GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg, under the direction of Sigurd Hofmann.

[53] (Yet another was originally reported to have been found on November 11, but it turned out to be based on data fabricated by Victor Ninov, and was later retracted.

During two runs, 9 atoms of 271Ds were convincingly detected by correlation with known daughter decay properties:[55] Prior to this, there had been failed synthesis attempts in 1986–87 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna (then in the Soviet Union) and in 1990 at the GSI.

[56] The IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party (JWP) recognised the GSI team as discoverers in their 2001 report, giving them the right to suggest a name for the element.

Although widely used in the chemical community on all levels, from chemistry classrooms to advanced textbooks, the recommendations were mostly ignored among scientists in the field, who called it "element 110", with the symbol of E110, (110) or even simply 110.

The name darmstadtium (Ds) was suggested by the GSI team in honor of the city of Darmstadt, where the element was discovered.

Several radioactive isotopes have been synthesized in the laboratory, either by fusing two atoms or by observing the decay of heavier elements.

[80] Theoretical calculation in a quantum tunneling model reproduces the experimental alpha decay half-life data for the known darmstadtium isotopes.

[88] Darmstadtium is expected to be a solid under normal conditions and to crystallize in the body-centered cubic structure, unlike its lighter congeners which crystallize in the face-centered cubic structure, because it is expected to have different electron charge densities from them.

[62] Even though the half-life of 281Ds, the most stable confirmed darmstadtium isotope, is 14 seconds, long enough to perform chemical studies, another obstacle is the need to increase the rate of production of darmstadtium isotopes and allow experiments to carry on for weeks or months so that statistically significant results can be obtained.

However, the experimental chemistry of darmstadtium has not received as much attention as that of the heavier elements from copernicium to livermorium.

[3][94][95] Following several unsuccessful attempts, 276Ds was produced in this reaction in 2022 and observed to have a half-life less than a millisecond and a low yield, in agreement with predictions.

[69] Additionally, 277Ds was successfully synthesized using indirect methods (as a granddaughter of 285Fl) and found to have a short half-life of 3.5 ms, not long enough to perform chemical studies.