Hungarian radiochemist · 1885–1966
George de Hevesy
George de Hevesy co-discovered hafnium in 1923 and invented the radioactive tracer method, for which he won the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
How Hafnium was found
In Copenhagen, de Hevesy and Dirk Coster tested Niels Bohr’s prediction that element 72 would be found with zirconium. De Hevesy did the chemistry, extracting zirconium compounds from Norwegian zircon, while Coster took the X-ray spectra.
The new element turned out to make up a few per cent of many zirconium minerals. It had been hidden because zirconium and hafnium are almost identical chemically.
Shared the credit
The discovery is credited jointly to these scientists.
Life and career
Born 1885 · Died 1966
De Hevesy was born in Budapest to a wealthy family and worked with Ernest Rutherford in Manchester. Failing to separate radium D from lead, he realised that radioactive isotopes could be used to trace where an element goes, in a plant, a body or a reaction.
When the Nazis invaded Denmark in 1940 he dissolved the gold Nobel medals of Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to keep them from being seized. After the war the gold was recovered and the medals recast.
Also known for
- Radioactive tracers in biology and medicine
- 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Discovered in the same era
Other elements identified within ten years of 1923.