Although Fajans and Göhring had been the first to discover the element, custom required that an element was represented by its longest-lived and most abundant isotope, and brevium did not seem appropriate. Fajans agreed to Meitner naming the element protactinium, and assigning it the chemical symbol Pa. In June 1918, Soddy and John Cranston announced that they had extracted a sample of the isotope, but unlike Meitner were unable to describe its characteristics.