German chemist
Oswald Helmuth Göhring
Oswald Göhring was a young chemist in Karlsruhe who, with Kasimir Fajans, identified the first isotope of protactinium in 1913.
How Protactinium was found
Göhring and Fajans separated the decay products of uranium and found a substance that emitted beta particles and vanished within minutes. It belonged in the gap between thorium and uranium.
They named it brevium, for its brief life. The isotope, protactinium-234m, has a half-life of about 1.2 minutes.
Shared the credit
The discovery is credited jointly to these scientists.
Life and career
Göhring carried out the work as a doctoral student in Fajans’s laboratory at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Little else is recorded of his life.
Discovered in the same era
Other elements identified within ten years of 1913.