Ida Eva Noddack-Tacke (1896 –1978) was born in Lackhausen, a suburb of Wesel, a town on the Rhine River 85 kilometers north of Köln (Cologne), Germany. She was the daughter of Adelberg Tacke, the owner of a varnish factory. Ida was educated at the Berlin Hochschule, earning her doctorate in engineering (Doktor-ingenieur) in 1921. She specialized in organic chemistry, thinking that she could improve the curing behavior of linseed oil in her father’s business. After her graduation, however, she met Walter Noddack (1893-1960) and was smitten by his quest for new elements. She joined the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, Berlin, in 1922 and they married four years later. The two researchers formed, as she called it, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft (work-unit) that held them together through mutual research and love in a manner reminiscent of Pierre and Marie Curie — some German journalists have called her “die deutsche Marie Curie.” The pair discovered the element rhenium in 1925; the same year they made the spurious discovery of masurium (element 43; technetium). Ida independently proposed the concept of nuclear fission in 1934 before the dramatic announcement of Hahn, Strassman, Meitner, and Fritsch in 1939, and in her article “Über das Element 93” refuted the claim of Fermi that he had produced that element by neutron bombardment of uranium.

Ida Noddack-Tacke: The actual proposer of nuclear fission before Hahn

254th National Meeting (2017)

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