Italian mineralogist · 1886–1948
Carlo Perrier
Carlo Perrier was the chemist and mineralogist in Palermo who, with Emilio Segrè, identified technetium in 1937, the first artificially produced element.
How Technetium was found
Segrè had brought back a molybdenum strip from the Berkeley cyclotron. Perrier carried out much of the delicate chemistry, separating the radioactive material from molybdenum and showing that it behaved like manganese and rhenium but differed from both.
They concluded it was element 43, a gap in the periodic table that several earlier claims, including the Noddacks’ “masurium”, had failed to fill convincingly. They proposed the name technetium in 1947.
Shared the credit
The discovery is credited jointly to these scientists.
Life and career
Born 1886 · Died 1948
Perrier was born in Turin and taught mineralogy at the universities of Palermo and later Genoa. His research covered the chemistry of minerals and geochemistry.
Discovered in the same era
Other elements identified within ten years of 1937.