Chemist and physicist who first mentioned nuclear fission: Who is Ida Noddack?

Ida Tacke was born on February 25, 1896 in Lackhausen, part of the city of Wesel. She was born to her father, who owned a small varnish factory. She started school with the Technical University of Berlin in 1915, six years after women were allowed to study at all universities in Berlin. In 1918, she graduated from the university with a degree in chemical and metallurgical engineering. One of the first women to study chemistry in Germany, Tacke was also part of one of the first generation of female students in Germany.

Then she started working in the chemistry laboratory of "AEG's Berlin turbine factory", a subsidiary of General Electric in the USA. She met her husband, Walter Noddack, while working as a researcher at the university. The couple married in 1926 and worked together as the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft" or "unit of work".

In 1934, Enrico Fermi combined uranium with neutrons in her laboratory in Rome. Thus, atomic chemistry found a new type of radioactivity that was drastically different from uranium and similar elements. She announced her findings, thinking it was evidence of a new transuranic element. Ida Noddack published an article questioning Fermi's conclusion and accurately criticized Fermi's chemical evidence. This theory gained wide acceptance within a few years. While Noddack's paper "Ten Elements 93" suggested a number of possibilities, she cited Fermi's failure to chemically remove all elements lighter than uranium in her evidence, not just up to lead. The article is considered historically important today, not only because it correctly states this, but because it suggests the possibility that "the nucleus is prone to splitting into several large fragments that will become isotopes of known elements."

Their explanation of this heralded what would become known a few years later as "nuclear fission." Noddack's theory, however, was not shown grounded as there was no empirical evidence for this possibility, and although she was right, it was often ignored and ridiculed. A woman's position at work was in decline due to the 1929 Wall Street crash. In 1932, a German law came into force, forcing married women to quit their jobs and become housewives so that there were more positions for men. Noddack managed to evade this law with her "unpaid co-operative" status, but this loophole caused her to be despised by men in the workplace for being able to work.

Noddack's idea of 'nuclear fission' was not confirmed until long after. On December 17, 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann provided chemical evidence that the transuranic elements are isotopes of barium, and Hahn wrote these results to her exiled colleague Lise Meitner, reporting the process as the 'explosion' of uranium. Meitner and Otto Frisch decided to use Frisch Kalckar and Niels Bohr's liquid drop hypothesis to provide the first theoretical model and mathematical proof of nuclear fission invented by Frisch. Thus, Noddack's original hypothesis was accepted.

Noddack and her husband-to-be searched the then unknown elements '43' and '75' in the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt. In 1925 they published a paper and announced that the new elements were named 'rhenium (75)' and 'masurium (43)'. They named the elements 'rhenium' after Ida's birthplace and 'masurium' in her honor. After scientists got suspicious, Noddack and her husband began conducting more experiments to confirm their discovery. However, they were only able to confirm the discovery of rhenium. These achievements were crowned when Ida was awarded the prestigious "Liebig Medal" of the German Chemical Society in 1931.

Element 43 was recognized by Emilio Segrè and Carlo Perrier in 1937 and named 'technetium' because of its artificial source. As a result of research on this, Noddack and her husband said that they had found element 43, but that the only way to detect its presence was to make radioactive measurements. This method was a technique the Noddacks couldn't use, and then Segrè and Perrier did.

Ida Noddack has been nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discoveries of 'rhenium' and 'masurium'. Noddack and her husband were repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1932, 1933, 1935 and 1937. Both were honored with the prestigious "Liebig Medal" of the German Chemical Society in 1931. In 1934, they received the "German patent" for rhenium concentrate, as well as the "Scheele Medal" of the Swedish Chemical Society.

In 1941 Noddack and her husband transferred to the University of Strasbourg. Noddack achieved a paid academic position as a professor at the university for the first time. In 1960, after her husband died, Noddack moved to a nursing home where she continued her research until 1968. She passed away in 1978 as well.

In 2020, she was crowned with the "memorial medal" of the discovery by ISTR, designed by Igor Petrov. Noddack, who often took the leading role in her life, was known for criticizing persistent concepts and proposing new ones. However, she was largely rejected due to the times and hardships she lived in.