Henry Moseley and Periodic Table of Elements miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Rachel Brazil2021-05-11T08:54:00+01:00
The German chemist discovered one element and may have been the first to suggest nuclear fission – but her legacy is troubled, as Rachel Brazil discovers
‘We want a heroine or a martyr’ when we read about forgotten women scientists, says Brigitte van Tiggelen, the Science History Institute’s director of European operations. Ida Noddack does not fit that description. Her legacy is complicated by her work for the academic regime set up by the Nazi government in 1930s Germany, which likely clouded post-war judgement of her work. But even before the war, Noddack’s insights were ignored and diminished by scientific contemporaries. As well as discovering the element rhenium, one of the last of the naturally occurring elements to be discovered, she suggested that bombardment of heavy nuclei could lead to their breakup, four years before the idea of nuclear fission was widely accepted. But disputed claims to have discovered the element te
Tacke received a bachelor’s and a doctoral degree from the Technical University in Berlin in 1919 and 1921, respectively. In 1925 she became a researcher at the Physico-Technical Research Agency in Berlin, where she began collaborating with chemists Walter Noddack and Otto Carl Berg.
When Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev proposed the periodic table of the chemical elements in 1871, he left gaps in places where he believed unknown elements would find their place. Two such gaps were below manganese at atomic numbers 43 and 75. Tacke, Noddack, and Berg set out to discover these two elements, and in 1925 they bombarded platinum and columbite ores with electrons, which collided with atomic nuclei that then emitted X-rays. The atomic number of an element could thus be deduced from the spectrum of X-rays that the nuclei emitted. They announced the detection of the two predicted elements: atomic number 43, which they called masurium, after the region in Prussia that Noddack had come from