Ida Noddack
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031161
Today is the birthday of chemist and physicist Ida Noddack, née Tacke, who was born in Lackhausen (now Wesel), Germany, in 1896. In 1925, she discovered the element rhenium (atomic number 75) along with chemists Otto Carl Berg and Walter Noddack. In her 1934 paper “On Element 93" she wrote, “When heavy nuclei are bombarded by neutrons, 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.” She never got much credit for this prediction of what would soon be called nuclear fission. (Image credit: Dome_de at the German language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Date in History: 25 February 1896
