Ida Noddack facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ida Noddack
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| Born |
Ida Tacke
25 February 1896 Lackhausen, Rhine Province, German Empire
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| Died | 24 September 1978 (aged 82) |
| Citizenship | Germany |
| Alma mater | Technical University of Berlin |
| Known for | Rhenium, nuclear fission |
| Awards | Liebig Medal Scheele Medal |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Chemist and physicist |
| Institutions | Allgemein Elektrizität Gesellschaft, Berlin; Siemens & Halske, Berlin; Physikalische Technische Reichsanstalt, Berlin; University of Freiburg, University of Strasbourg; Staatliche Forschungs Institut für Geochemie, Bamberg |
Ida Noddack (born Ida Tacke on February 25, 1896 – died September 24, 1978) was a German scientist. She was both a chemist and a physicist. In 1934, she was the first person to suggest the idea of nuclear fission. This is a process where an atom's nucleus splits into smaller parts.
Ida Noddack also helped discover a new chemical element. With her husband, Walter Noddack, and another scientist named Otto Berg, she found element 75, which is called rhenium. Her important work led to her being nominated three times for the famous Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Contents
Ida Noddack's Early Life and Education
Ida Tacke was born in a town called Lackhausen in Germany in 1896. When she was deciding what to study, she knew she didn't want to be a teacher. She also noticed that not many physicists worked in research or industry back then.
So, she decided to become a chemist. Her father, who owned a small paint factory, was happy with her choice. Ida chose to attend the Technical University of Berlin. She liked that its programs were long and challenging.
She started at the university in 1915. This was only six years after women were first allowed to study at Berlin's universities. In her class, 9 out of 85 students were studying chemistry.
In 1918, Ida graduated with a degree in chemical and metallurgical engineering. She focused on certain types of fats. She was one of the first women in Germany to study chemistry. During World War I, the number of women studying chemistry in Germany grew a lot.
After graduating, she worked in a chemistry lab in Berlin. This lab belonged to a company called AEG.
Ida Noddack's Partnership in Science
The building where Ida worked at AEG was very famous. It was designed by Peter Behrens and looked like a turbine.
Ida met her future husband, Walter Noddack, at the Technical University of Berlin. He was working there as a researcher. They got married in 1926.
Both before and after they were married, Ida and Walter worked together as partners. They called their scientific partnership an "Arbeitsgemeinschaft," which means "work unit."
Ida Noddack and the Idea of Nuclear Fission
In 1934, a scientist named Enrico Fermi did some experiments. He thought he had created new elements heavier than uranium. Many scientists believed his idea for a few years.
However, Ida Noddack disagreed. She wrote a paper called "On Element 93." In it, she pointed out that Fermi had not checked for all lighter elements in his tests. She thought he should have checked for elements lighter than uranium, not just down to lead.
Ida's paper is very important today. She not only showed a problem in Fermi's work, but she also suggested something amazing. She wrote that "it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments." She said these fragments would be isotopes of known elements. This idea was exactly what would later be called nuclear fission.
At the time, Ida's idea didn't have experimental proof. So, other scientists mostly ignored or even made fun of her theory. Some German scientists, like Otto Hahn, thought her work was "ridiculous."
During this time, it was becoming harder for women to work. After the 1929 Wall Street crash, many countries, including Germany, passed laws. These laws often made married women leave their jobs to create more jobs for men. Ida Noddack was able to keep working because she was an "unpaid collaborator." This special status might have made some male scientists look down on her.
Ida Noddack's idea of nuclear fission was proven much later. In 1938, other scientists like Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot-Curie did similar experiments. They found strange results that were hard to explain.
Finally, on December 17, 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann found clear chemical proof. They showed that uranium nuclei really did split into lighter elements. Hahn wrote to his colleague Lise Meitner about this "bursting" of the uranium nucleus.
Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch then used a scientific model to explain this process. Frisch named it nuclear fission. He also did experiments to show that energy was released when the nucleus split. So, Ida Noddack's original idea was finally accepted as correct.
The Discovery of Rhenium
Ida Noddack and her husband searched for unknown elements. In 1925, they published a paper. They announced the discovery of two new elements: element 75, which they called rhenium, and element 43, which they called masurium.
They named rhenium after Ida's birthplace. They named masurium after Walter's home region. Other scientists were unsure about their findings. So, the Noddacks did more experiments to confirm their discoveries.
They were able to confirm the discovery of rhenium. However, they could not isolate element 43, and their results for it could not be repeated by others. Despite this, their work led to Ida receiving the important Liebig Medal in 1931 from the German Chemical Society.
Element 43 was later officially found in 1937 by Emilio Segrè and Carlo Perrier. They found it in a piece of metal that had been used in a particle accelerator. It was later named technetium. This name comes from the fact that it was made artificially.
Awards and Recognition
Ida Noddack was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. These nominations were for her discovery of rhenium and her work on masurium. She and her husband were nominated several times between 1932 and 1937.
In 1931, both Ida and Walter Noddack received the prestigious Liebig Medal from the German Chemical Society. In 1934, they also received the Scheele Medal from the Swedish Chemical Society. They also got a German patent for how to get rhenium from ores.
See also
In Spanish: Ida Noddack para niños
