As we get closer to the century since the discovery of rhenium, speciality metals trader Anthony Lipmann introduces us to the extraordinary woman who identified this rare element in the 1920s
Ida Tacke at Freiburg Lab, 1935-1941, credit KU Leuven
As some readers of The Crucible know, our small company, Lipmann Walton & Co Ltd., has been involved with the trade
in rhenium for over thirty years ̶ almost a third of the period since the element’s discovery in 1925 ̶ the centenary of
which we celebrate next year.
Our involvement has also brought us close to the stories related to this element as well as the character of the person
responsible for its discovery.
That person was a German woman by the name of Ida Tacke, born in 1896, at the same time as my Austrian-Jewish grandparents, my grandfather growing up to become a chemist. One of the first women in Germany to study chemistry, Tackeattended Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg (now Berlin Institute of Technology a.k.a. TU Berin) graduating with a degree in chemical and metallurgical engineering. This was a time when German chemistry was a male preserve, dominated by institutions untouched by the presence of females in major roles.
And yet against all these odds, it was Ida Tacke who discovered rhenium.
In her favour was the good fortune to have worked in Berlin early in her career where she acquired contacts at the Siemens Halske lamp factory which gave her access to one of the key tools in her armoury ̶ X-Ray instruments able to spectrographically identify periodicity in elements.
At the time, there was an unholy competition amongst chemists and physicists to fill in the remaining gaps in the
periodic table as predicted by Mendeleev in 1869. Each gap was referred to by the Sanskrit word‘ Eka’ meaning ‘one’ (one
step removed), or ‘Dwi’ (two steps removed). Thus the undiscovered element 75 was called ‘Dwi-Manganese’ ̶ two
rows down from manganese.
But this turned out to be misleading, as the element sought did not appear to have the properties associated with those
close to it. Tacke was an assiduous scientist, testing more than 1,800 mineral samples before alighting upon reactions
that appeared to suggest that she had discovered two of the missing links.
In 1925 she wrote up her findings in her now famous paper entitled ‘Two New Elements of the Manganese Group’. The
two were: rhenium (element 75) which Tacke separated from a sample of Norwegian columbite and named after the
River Rhine, and element 43 which Walter Noddack, head of the Physico-Technical Research Office, and Tacke’s coworker,
named element ‘masurium’ after the area of East Prussia called Masuria in which he was born.
While Tacke is often referred to by her married name Noddack, at the time of her paper she was still unmarried, and so the paper is credited to Ida Tacke and Walter Noddack with the name Otto Berg (the X-Ray spectrographer from Berlin) mentioned on other papers of the day. In reality, it is most likely Tacke’s genius that was largely responsible for the
discovery, while Noddack’s presence on the paper may be attributed to the fact that he was head of the Imperial Physico-Technical Research Office where Tacke worked as an unpaid research assistant ̶ and without whose position and
protection the paper could not have been published.
For this reason, I hope readers will understand why I continue to refer as much as possible to Ida Tacke by her unmarried name, especially as her marriage took place in 1926, the year after her momentous discovery. As it happened, the Noddack/Tacke findings regarding masurium were dismissed, as the results of the experiment by which it was isolated could not be replicated. It was not until more than a decade later, that Italian scientists confirmed the existence of element 43, ultimately named technetium.
However, the scientific community welcomed Tacke’s rhenium results which were reproduceable. And by 1927, Tacke had identified the main host mineral by which rhenium is still recovered today, molybdenite, extracting 1 gramme of rhenium from 660 kgs of Norwegian molybdenum sulphide ore. So it was that some chemists have called rhenium an orphan metal ̶ neither sharing sufficient properties with the platinum group along its horizontal line in the periodic table, nor the vertical column of Group 7 headed by manganese.
Rhenium was thus a dissenting element, fittingly discovered by a courageous woman who was a determined dissident struggling against male chauvinism and institutional arrogance. Someone who was not even paid a salary until very late in life. The high-handedness of the chemistry and physics community towards women in general, and Tacke in particular, had
one huge consequence though. For in 1934 Ida Tacke had the temerity to write a paper entitled ‘On Element 93’ , published
in the famous German journal Nature , in which she questioned the findings of Fermi who claimed to have discovered
the element later christened Neptunium.
Tacke asserted that what had happened when Fermi bombarded a sample of uranium nitrate was not the discovery of a new element but the breaking of an atom into two smaller ones.
When nuclei are bombarded by neutrons, it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments which would of course be isotopes of known elements but would not be neighbours of the irradiated element’ ,” she wrote.
Ida Tacke had discovered nuclear fission.
In 1939, of course, with the continuing bias of the day, Otto Hahn claimed this discovery, although now it is known that
he ignored and refused to answer questions that Tacke had raised five years earlier.
The implication of this is one of the great ‘What Ifs?’ of both chemical history, and history as a whole.
For reasons therefore of chauvinism, Germany in the mid-1930s ̶ under Hitler and the Nazis ̶ was denied the bomb and the possibility of nuclear power generation, while Einstein in August 1939, by now in America, realised what the implications of fission could be and petitioned President Roosevelt to secure enough uranium ore, without which Project Manhattan would not have been possible.*
I have no information about what Tacke thought in later life about her role at the threshold of the Atomic Energy Age.
Instead, she continued her life in chemistry, receiving only gradual and grudging recognition, and never awarded the ultimate gong of a Nobel prize (although she was nominated for it four times).
By Anthony Lipmann
*Anyone interested to learn more about how America obtained uranium supply during WW2 should read Susan Williams’ ‘Spies in the Congo’ (2016) about the proxy battle fought over DRCs Shinkolobwe mine containing the highest uranium content of any uranium-bearing ore.
Rhenium at 99
During LME Week, Lipmann Walton is holding an event at The Royal Society of Chemistry in London on Tuesday 1st
October to celebrate rhenium’s first 99 years.
Professor Martyn Poliakoff will launch a new periodic video about Rhenium; I will be talking about Ida Tacke; producers and recyclers will be looking at how rhenium units find their way to the market; and Liliia Shepel of Lipmann Walton will be telling the story of attempts to get rhenium out of a volcano.
If you would like to attend, please contact Lipmann Walton on [email protected] to see if there are spaces.
