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Princeton physicist John Wheeler made "black hole" the standard name for a collapsed star that not even light can leave. He did not invent the phrase. The full story involves a journalist, a Princeton colleague and an 18th-century prison cell in Kolkata.
Who coined the term black hole?
Nobody knows for certain. Here is the record, according to a history by physicists Carlos Herdeiro and José Lemos, The black hole fifty years after: Genesis of the name.
18 January 1964: journalist Ann Ewing used "black hole" in Science News Letter, reporting on a December 1963 AAAS meeting in Cleveland. This is the first known appearance of the term in print.
24 January 1964: Albert Rosenfeld in Life magazine wrote of an "invisible black hole in the universe" after the first Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in Dallas.
29 December 1967: Wheeler used the term in a lecture called "Space and Time" at the AAAS annual meeting at the New York Hilton.
1968: the written lecture, "Our Universe: The Known and the Unknown", appeared in American Scientist, and the name spread worldwide.
According to Science News, Rosenfeld later said he had simply heard the term at the Dallas meeting and did not remember who said it. The same article quotes the science writer Marcia Bartusiak on Wheeler: "He never said he originated the term." What mattered, she said, was that he had the authority to give scientists permission to use it.
Why did Wheeler need a new name?
Physicists had the maths before they had a good word. Karl Schwarzschild found the first exact solution of Einstein's equations in 1916, and in 1939 Oppenheimer and Snyder showed that a heavy enough star can collapse inside its own gravitational radius, as Herdeiro and Lemos describe. Soviet physicists said "frozen star"; Wheeler and others said "collapsed star". (More in our post on Karl Schwarzschild and the first black hole solution.)
Wheeler's own phrase was a mouthful: "gravitationally completely collapsed object". In his autobiography he recalled telling a conference audience at NASA's Goddard Institute in New York, in autumn 1967, that he could not keep repeating it, and someone called out, "How about black hole?" Bartusiak found that the conference actually took place in May 1968, so the memory is not reliable, but the December 1967 lecture and the 1968 article are on record.
What does the Black Hole of Calcutta have to do with it?
Astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu, who coined the word "quasar", traced the term to a colloquium in 1960 or 1961 by Robert Dicke, Wheeler's colleague at Princeton. Dicke compared collapsed stars to the "black hole of Calcutta", the cramped Fort William cell where East India Company prisoners were held after Siraj ud-Daulah took the fort in June 1756, according to Herdeiro and Lemos. Other sources dispute details of that account. Dicke's children remembered him saying lost things "must have been sucked into the black hole of Calcutta".
Physicist José Acácio de Barros told the authors that, in 1996, Wheeler said the voice in the audience was Dicke's. That is one person's memory, so treat it as likely, not proven.
Why can't light escape a black hole?
The name fits the physics: inside a certain radius, getting out would take more than light speed. The Class 11 formula for escape speed from a mass M at distance r is v = √(2GM/r), as shown in our step-by-step escape velocity derivation. Set v equal to c and solve for r:
r = 2GM/c²
This is the Schwarzschild radius; Einstein's theory gives the same expression. John Michell used similar Newtonian reasoning for dark stars that light could not leave.
Worked example for the Sun. Use G = 6.67430 × 10⁻¹¹ m³ kg⁻¹ s⁻² (NIST), c = 299,792,458 m/s (NIST) and the Sun's mass, 1.9884 × 10³⁰ kg (NASA Sun fact sheet).
2GM = 2 × 6.6743 × 10⁻¹¹ × 1.9884 × 10³⁰ ≈ 2.654 × 10²⁰ m³/s²
c² ≈ 8.988 × 10¹⁶ m²/s²
r = 2.654 × 10²⁰ ÷ 8.988 × 10¹⁶ ≈ 2,950 m, about 3 km
The real Sun has a radius of 695,700 km (NASA Sun fact sheet), so its radius would need squeezing more than 200,000 times. For Earth, mass 5.9722 × 10²⁴ kg (NASA Earth fact sheet), you get about 9 mm: a planet smaller than a marble.
If formulas like this feel abstract, the Fermi Simulation Lab has interactive simulations for ideas that are easier to see than to read. The Fermi Problem Library has a step-by-step solver that explains the reasoning rather than printing an answer.
How do you remember the story for a quiz or viva?
Keep four layers apart:
The idea: dark stars, from Newtonian gravity (Michell, then Laplace).
The maths: Schwarzschild in 1916; Oppenheimer and Snyder in 1939.
The phrase: Dicke, around 1960; first in print on 18 January 1964 (Ewing).
The popular name: Wheeler, lecture on 29 December 1967; American Scientist, 1968.
For a one-mark question, write Wheeler and add "popularised it in 1967". With room to explain, mention Dicke and the 1964 print use: it shows you know the difference between inventing a word and making it stick. Then try r = 2GM/c² for another planet on NASA's fact sheets.
