Ida Tacke's paper on fission was ignored by the physics community.
Ida Tacke and the
Although the life of German chemist Ida Eva Tacke spans some 82 years, from
1896-1978, her most important scientific work took place in the years between
the two world wars. In 1925, the young chemist announced her team's discovery
of the last two "missing" elements in Mendeleev's periodic table.
Her discovery of Rhenium, element 75, has never been in dispute, but the
element 43 is another matter (no pun intended). Tacke named it Masurium,
but scientists outside Germany doubted her claim and rejected the name.
Most scientists believed element 43 was so rare and it had such a short
half-life, that it had probably disappeared off the face of the earth. Physicists
Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segre created element 43 artificially in the cyclotron.
They called it Technetium, the name which is used today.
Ten years later in 1935, Tacke published another important paper, in which
she proposed that atoms were split into large fragments in Enrico
Fermi's experiments involving so-called transuranic elements. The atomic
physics community ignored her completely. It turns out that she was right
and Fermi wrong, but he got the Nobel Prize in physics anyway. Tacke's paper
came five years before Otto Stern and Lise
Meitner discovered "fission" and coined that term. Of course,
once the scientists accepted the fact that fission was possible (in around 1940)
it led directly to the construction of the atomic bomb.
Why did the scientific community ignore Tacke's discoveries? Sexism is only
part of the answer; there were other contributing factors. For one thing,
to identify elements 43 and 75, Tacke used a different method. Previous
researchers tried unsuccessfully to extract a small amount from ores. (Marie
Curie, for example, painstakingly isolated a small amound of radium from
uranium). Tacke, on the other hand, used spectroscopy and a formula discovered
by British scientist Henry
G. J. Moseley. The formula (written below) relates the atomic number
of an element to the frequency of X-rays it emits. Moseley was killed in
action in World War I, otherwise he might have pursued this line of research
himself.
After World War I, women like Ida Tacke could take advantage of new laws
permitting them to attend German universities and earn advanced degrees
for the first time in German history. Tacke attended a technical university
in Charlottenburg, and she obtained an engineering degree in 1919. She grew
up in a family where her father manufactured varnishes and lacquers so it
is not surprising she would take a first in chemistry and metallurgy. She
completed her PhD in 1921 and found employment outside academia. Her first
jobs from 1921-1925 were with Allgemeine Electrical Works and Siemans-Halske.
The Weimar Republic was an era of "the new woman" - bold, independent,
and employed. Of course, most young women who were white collar workers
in Germany at this time were employed as secretaries and shop girls not
scientists. Many progressive reforms for women and for workers were superficial.
The vast majority of the German people went along with them grudgingly.
The un-reformed legal code still reflected the 19th century rather than
the 1920's view of women.
Tacke's next job was with the The Imperial Physico-Technical Research Office.
This was a government lab and not a major research center for atomic physics
like the Cavendish lab or the Curie's lab. This ultimately worked against
Tacke. Nevertheless, Walter Noddack the head of the chemistry lab gave her
encouragement to begin the search for the mysterious, elusive elements 43
and 75. Eventually, Tacke and Noddack got married to eachother. The third
person on their team was Otto Berg, an X-ray specialist from Siemens-Halske.
The Noddacks and Berg bombarded with electron beams over 400 samples
they prepared from columbite ore. Columbite is a black mineral containing
platinum and niobium. It's the niobium which contains very small amounts
of elements 43 and 75 which emit very weak X-rays. Just how much element
43 is in niobium is at the heart of the controversy over Masurium. The Noddacks
knew it would be small amount, but in their published paper they over-estimated
it by several orders of magnitude. This did not help their credibility.
Ernest
O. Lawrence, the American inventor of the cyclotron, called the Noddacks
"deluded."
Another important factor working against the Noddacks was their choice of
names for elements 43 and 75. Tacke chose Rhenium for element 75 for the
river Rhine. The scientific community found this acceptable. Her husband
chose Masurium for his homeland in eastern Prussia in what is now Poland.
Scientists outside Germany thought this name was patriotic in an obnoxious
way. The Russians had lost a major battle to Germany in the Battle of Masurian
Lakes in 1914. To the British especially, the name Masurium suggested a
political agenda or "a stupid blunder which no civilized scientist
would make."
The rise to power of the National Socialists in the 1920's did not make
life any easier for German scientists. The scientific community became increasingly
polarized for or against the Nazis as did the rest of German society. Hitler
only ran for political office once in his career, and he came in second.
Despite this, he was appointed Chancellor in 1933 by President Hindenburg.
Apparently Hindenburg and politicos from the SPD (socialists) and KPD (communists)
believed the depression was an economic catastrophe so severe that no politician
could fix it. Hitler, they predicted, would fail and the Nazi party would
lose credibility and public support.
Instead, Hitler suspended the fragile democracy of the Weimar Republic.
He immediately arrested his political enemies in the socialist and communist
parties. Next, the Nazis started sterilizing and, later, euthenizing groups
of citizens they identified as "useless" like barren women and
the physically and mentally challenged. In addition to these crimes, the
Nazis began a war against not only Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals but also
"Jewish science" and "Bolshevik new women." Double-earners
like the Noddacks were criticized. Tacke and other professional women were
forced to resign their jobs. The Nazi regime offered "marriage loans"
to couples to encourage women to leave the workforce. Intimidated, feminist
leaders in the BDF capitulated to the Nazi view of women as little more
than baby-making machines.
In 1935 when Tacke's paper on fission was published, she did not have a
scientific position or a title. In that same year, her husband was appointed
professor of physical chemistry at Freiburg University. The Noddacks moved
to the city of Baden and remained there for the next seven years. In 1942,
Walter Noddack was again given another important position at the University
of Strasbourg. The Nazis re-occupied this disputed territory and took control
of its university. The Noddacks were never members of the Nazi party; however,
they never publically opposed them either. One can surmise that they must
have been sympathetic to the Nazi regime in order to obtain these academic
positions. Lise Meitner called them "opportunists." She herself
had to leave Germany for safety in Sweden because her family was Jewish.
There is something more than ironic, even pathetic, about a woman like
Ida Tacke who supported a regime that forced women out of their jobs in
the professions. After the war, Walter Noddack was investigated and cleared
of any involvement in war crimes. Ida Tacke was never investigated because
she never had a paid position. Strangely, all of the documents describing
their work on enriched isotopes disappeared from their lab. The couple left
Germany and lived in Turkey for several years. In 1956, they returned to
Germany and resumed scientific work at the newly built State Research Institute
for Geochemistry. Tacke was elected to several scientific societies, but
none in the English-speaking world.
In 1988, ten years after Tacke's death, Pieter van Assche re-examined her
spectroscopic data on Rhenium and Masurium. His findings sparked a new debate
in the scientific community about her claims for discovery of element 43.
Today, it is known that uranium contains some element 43 from spontaneous
fission: billionths of a gram for every kilogram of uranium. The ores studied
by the Noddacks may have contained as much as ten percent uranium. Recently,
John T. Armstrong of the NIST ran a virtual experiment using spectral-analyzer
software to duplicate the Noddacks' experiment. He concluded that their
instruments were sufficiently sensitive to detect less than a billionth
of a gram. Armstrong believes "it's highly likely that they did discover
element 43."
Finally, some 75 years late, the achievements of Ida Tacke are coming out
from the shadows of science herstory.
FOR FURTHER READING -
1. "She was Ignored" by Terry Hopper, Master's Thesis, 1990,
Stanford University
2. "Ignored Priorities," Pieter van Assche, Nuclear Europe,
1988, pages 24-25.
3. "An Elemental Mystery," Alden M. Hayashi, Scientifc American,
February, 2000, page 18.
4. "Moseley and Many-electron Atoms," The Quantum Physicists,
William H. Cropper, 1970, pages 50-53.
5. "Ida Noddack: Proposer of Nuclear Fission," Fathi Habashi,
A Devotion to Their Science, 1997,
pages 217-225
6. Women and Socialism/ Socialism and Women, Ed. Helmut Gruber and
Pamela Graves, 1998
7. Mothers in the Fatherland, Claudia Koonz, St. Martin's Press,
1987
Copyright 2001 by Kevin A. Nies