24 September 1978 - Death of Ida Eva Tacke-Noddack, discovered rhenium and first proposed the idea of nuclear fission

Born Ida Tacke, she was one of the first German women to study chemistry at the Technical University of Charlottenburg in Berlin, and, in 1925, she began working in the laboratory of the Imperial Institute for Technical Physics, which was run by the chemist Walter Noddack, whom she married in 1926, adopting the surname Noddack.

A year earlier, together with the X-ray expert Otto Berg, they had identified element 75, naming it ‘Rhenium’, from Rhenus, the Latin name for the river Rhine. It is an extremely rare metal in nature (1 gram for every 660 kilos of molybdenum) and is the last element in the table to be found in its natural form. Today, its main deposits are in Chile and Kazakhstan. For this discovery, the couple received the Liebig Medal of the German Chemical Society in 1931.

At the same time, Tacke and Noddack identified another element in the periodic table, number 43, which they called ‘Masurium’, in honour of the German victory over the Russians at the Masurian Lakes. Unable to determine it in successive experiments, the finding remained unconfirmed until 1937, when it was made by the Italians Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segré, who named the element ‘technetium’.

In 1934, a paper by Enrico Fermi was published in Nature, according to which ‘the bombardment of uranium atoms with neutrons produced a radioactive substance’, but the couple published another article in a Magazine for use in chemistry, with another hypothesis, contrary to Fermi's assertion, in which ‘uranium on receiving neutrons could decay into large fragments which would be isotopes of known elements, but not neighbours of the irradiated element’. This was the first prediction of what would later be called nuclear fission, but it was ignored because it implied a great departure from accepted views of nuclear physics and was not supported by any theory to explain it. Years later, in 1939, research by Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Lise Meitner would prove Tacke-Noddack right, so it is undeniable that the idea of nuclear fission was hers.

If you want to know more about this scientist, click on the following link: Ida Eva Tacke-Noddack