Ida Noddack

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Ida Noddack Tacke (25 February 1896 in Wesel - 1978) was a German chemist and physicist. With her husband Walter Noddack, she discovered a number of new elements. She was the first scientist to recognize nuclear fission, suggesting in 1934 that the neutron bombardment experiments of Enrico Fermi produced elements lighter than uranium rather than transuranic elements. Her publication of the atom-splitting hypothesis received little attention, however, in part because Otto Hahn considered it extremely unlikely; fission (as it was dubbed by biologist James Arnold) was not accepted until Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch provided a theoretical explanation for the phenomenon.

[edit] Background

Ida Noddack Tacke was one of the first women in Germany to study chemistry. She attained a doctorate in 1919 at the technical university of Berlin "over anhydrides of higher aliphatic fatty acids" and worked afterwards in the field being the first woman in the industry in Germany.She and her husband looked for the then still unknown elements of the ordinal numbers 43 and 75 at the Physical Institute for Realm. They succeeded in 1925, and they called the new elements Rhenium and Masurium. Only the discovery of the rhenium was later confirmed, and the discovery of the element number 43 was doubted. This was finally discovered in 1937 and called Technetium, whereupon the name "Masurium" went into oblivion.

Ida Noddack Tacke was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry but never received it.