German chemist · 1893–1960
Walter Noddack
Walter Noddack co-discovered rhenium in 1925, the last element with stable isotopes to be found.
How Rhenium was found
Noddack, Ida Tacke and Otto Berg searched for the two missing elements below manganese, numbers 43 and 75. They concentrated rare minerals such as columbite and gadolinite and examined them with X-ray spectroscopy.
They found the X-ray lines of element 75 and named it rhenium, after the Rhine. In 1928 they extracted a full gram of it from 660 kilograms of molybdenite. Their simultaneous claim to have found element 43, which they called masurium, was never confirmed.
Shared the credit
The discovery is credited jointly to these scientists.
Life and career
Born 1893 · Died 1960
Noddack was born in Berlin and studied there under Walther Nernst. He worked at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt and later held professorships in Freiburg, Strasbourg and Bamberg. He married Ida Tacke in 1926 and they worked together for the rest of his life.
Discovered in the same era
Other elements identified within ten years of 1925.