  Black holes are extreme spacetime deformations where even light is
imprisoned. There is an extensive astrophysical evidence for the real and
abundant existence of these prisons of matter and light in the Universe.
Mathematically, black holes are described by solutions of the field equations
of the theory of general relativity, the first of which was published in 1916
by Karl Schwarzschild. Another highly relevant solution, representing a
rotating black hole, was found by Roy Kerr in 1963. It was only much after the
publication of the Schwarzschild solution, however, that the term black hole
was employed to describe these objects. Who invented it? Conventional wisdom
attributes the origin of the term to the prominent North American physicist
John Wheeler who first adopted it in a general audience article published in
1968. This, however, is just one side of a story that begins two hundred years
before in an Indian prison colloquially known as the Black Hole of Calcutta.
Robert Dicke, also a distinguished physicist and colleague of Wheeler at
Princeton University, aware of the prison's tragedy began, around 1960, to
compare gravitationally completely collapsed stars to the black hole of
Calcutta. The whole account thus suggests reconsidering who indeed coined the
name black hole and commends acknowledging its definitive birth to a
partnership between Wheeler and Dicke.
