Ida Noddack

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Ida Noddack

Born

Ida Tacke 25 February 1896 Lackhausen,[1] Rhine Province,German Empire

Died

24 September 1978 (aged 82) Bad Neuenahr,[1] Bad NeuenahrAhrweiler, Rhineland-Palatinate,West Germany

Residence

Germany, France,[2] Turkey[2]

Citizenship

Germany

Fields

Chemist and physicist

Institutions

Allgemein Elektrizitt Gesellschaft, Berlin; Siemens & Halske, Berlin; Physikalische Technische Reichsanstalt, Berlin; University of Freiburg, University of Strasbourg; Staatliche Forschungs Institut fr Geochemie, Bamberg[1]

Alma mater

Technical University of Berlin[1]

Known for

Rhenium, nuclear fission

Notable awards

Liebig Medal Scheele Medal[1]

Ida Noddack (25 February 1896 29 October 1978), ne Ida Tacke, was a German chemist and physicist. She was the first to mention the idea of nuclear fission in [3] 1934. With her husband Walter Noddack she discovered element 75, rhenium. She was [4] nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Contents
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1 Background 2 Nuclear fission 3 Element discovery priority 4 Nobel nominations 5 Bibliography 6 References 7 External links

Background[edit]
Ida Tacke was born in Wesel, Lackhausen. She was one of the first women in Germany to study chemistry. She attained a doctorate in 1919 at the Technical University of Berlin "On higher aliphatic fatty acid anhydrides" and worked afterwards in the field, becoming the first woman to hold a professional chemist's position in the chemical industry in Germany. She and chemist Walter Noddack were married in 1926. Both before and after their marriage [6] they worked as partners, an "Arbeitsgemeinschaft" or "work unit", but with the exception of her [7] work at the University of Strasbourg, her positions were unpaid appointments.
[5]

Nuclear fission[edit]
Noddack correctly criticized Enrico Fermi's chemical proofs in his 1934 neutron bombardment experiments, from which he postulated that transuranic elements might have been produced, and which was widely accepted for a few years. Her paper, "On Element 93" suggested a number of possibilities, centering around Fermi's failure to chemically eliminate all lighter than uranium elements in his proofs, rather than only down to lead. The paper is considered historically significant today not simply because she correctly pointed out the flaw in Fermi's chemical proof but because she suggested the possibility that " it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments, which would of course be isotopes of known elements but would not be neighbors of the irradiated element." In so doing she presaged what would become known a few years later as nuclear fission. However Noddack offered no experimental

proof or theoretical basis for this possibility, which defied the understanding at the time. The paper was generally ignored. Later experiments along a similar line to Fermi's, by Irne Joliot-Curie, and Pavle Savi in 1938 raised what they called "interpretational difficulties" when the supposed transuranics exhibited the properties of rare earths rather than those of adjacent elements. Ultimately on December 17, 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann provided chemical proof that the previously presumed transuranic elementswere isotopes of barium, and Hahn wrote these exciting results to his exiled colleague Lise Meitner, explaining the process as a 'bursting' of the uranium nucleus into lighter elements. It remained for Meitner who had been forced to flee Germany in July 1938 and her exiled nephew Otto Frisch utilizing Fritz Kalckar and Niels Bohr's liquid drop hypothesis (first proposed by George Gamow in 1935) to provide a first theoretical model and mathematical proof of what Frisch named nuclear fission (he coined this term). (Frisch also experimentally verified the fission reaction by means of a cloud chamber, confirming the energy [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] release).

Element discovery priority[edit]

Ida and her husband-to-be looked for the then still unknown elements 43 and 75 at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt. In 1925, they published a paper (Zwei neue Elemente der Mangangruppe, Chemischer Teil) claiming to have done so, and called the new elements Rhenium and Masurium. Only the discovery of rhenium was confirmed. They were unable to isolate element 43 and their results were not reproducible. Their choice of the term masurium was also considered unacceptably nationalistic and may have contributed to a poor [citation needed] reputation amongst scientists of the day. Artificially produced element 43 was definitively isolated in 1937 by Emilio Segr and Carlo Perrier from a discarded piece of molybdenum foil from a cyclotron which had undergone beta decay. It was eventually named technetium due to its artificial source. No isotope of technetium has a half-life longer than 4.2 million years and was presumed to have disappeared on earth in as a naturally occurring element. In 1961 minute amounts of technetium in pitchblende 238 produced from spontaneous U fission were discovered by B. T. Kenna and P. K. [18] Kuroda. Based on this discovery, Belgian physicist Pieter van Assche constructed an analysis [clarification needed] of their data to show that the detection limit of Noddacks' analytical method could 9 have been 1000 times lower than the 10 value reported in their paper, in order to show the Noddacks could have been the first to find measurable amounts of element 43, as the ores they [19] had analyzed contained uranium. Using Van Assche's estimates of the Noddacks' residue compositions, NIST scientist John T. Armstrong, simulated the original X-ray spectrum with a computer, and claimed that the results were "surprisingly close to their published [20] spectrum!" Gunter Herrmann from the University of Mainz examined van Assche's arguments, and concluded they were developed ad hoc, and forced to a predetermined [21] 99 result. According to Kenna and Kuroda technetium content expected in a typical pitchblende 10 (50% uranium) is about 10 g/kg of ore. F. Habashi pointed out that uranium was never more than about 5% in Noddacks' columbite samples, and the amount of element 43 could not 11 exceed 3 10 g/kg of ore. Such a low quantity could not be weighed, nor give X-ray lines of element 43 clearly distinguishable from the background noise. The only way to detect its presence is to carry out radioactive measurements, a technique the Noddacks did not use, but [22][23][24][25][26] Segr and Perrier did. Following on the van Assche and Armstrong claims, an investigation was made into the works of Masataka Ogawa who had made a prior claim to the Noddacks. In 1908 he claimed to have

isolated element 43, calling it Nipponium. Using an original plate (not a simulation), Kenji Yoshihara determined Ogawa had not found the Period 5 Group 7 element43 (ekamanganese), but had successfully separated Period 6 Group 7 element 75 (dvi-manganese) [27][28][29] (rhenium), preceding the Noddacks by 17 years.

Nobel nominations[edit]