Prof Andrea Sella, UCL, photo: MMTA
October 1st 2024 saw a gathering at The Royal Society of Chemistry in London to celebrate an unusual birthday — the 99th year since the first isolation of rhenium.
The last naturally occurring element in the periodic table to be discovered, you could say that in its youth it was an element looking for a job (which at first it found in thermocouples and X-Ray targets). Later its resistance to deformation under the extremes of heat and cryogenic cold were capitalised in man’s attempted conquest of space. In middle age it found mature uses in reforming catalysts, and now over four score years and ten the element holds its unsubstitutable place in nickel base alloys for gas turbine engines.
But this is a story told in mundane human terms…the real truth is that this rarest of elements (at 0.4 parts per billion in the earth’s crust and 77th most abundant element, 100,000 times less common than copper) predates our human story by trillions of years.
Neverthless, why not celebrate its human discovery?
To help us on our way, guests from the worlds of chemistry, geology and physics, as well as metal merchants, producers, and journalists — and chemistry students from a state school in the West of England — enjoyed an array of speakers.
Materials scientist Mark Miodownik (BBC broadcaster, creator of The Institute of Making at UCL and author of numerous books on popular science) told us about his early days working on single crystal alloys.
James Peer, Maritime House. Photo; MMTA
James Peer of Maritime House spoke of the vicissitudes of recovering rhenium from spent nickel alloy, while Suzannah Lipmann explained how the sudden entry of China as a buyer of 30% of world supply in 2023 had taken many by surprise.
Professor of Chemistry, Andrea Sella, of UCL, demonstrated how a sliver of rhenium, drilled with a minute hole, is essential to the diamond anvil cell (a device in which matter is squeezed between two gem-quality diamonds, mimicking the vast pressures at the core of the earth, with the rhenium ensuring that the sample doesn’t squirt out sideways like toothpaste).
Finally, my colleague Liliia Shepel told the story of the Russian volcanologist Henrikh Steinberg who believed it would be possible one day to extract rhenium from the fumes of the Kudryaviy Volcano in the Russian Far East.
The occasion also sought to shine a spotlight on the German scientist to whom we owe rhenium’s unveiling. Her name was Ida Tacke, a chemist born in the town of Lackhausen near the river Rhine, which gave its name to rhenium. Only 29 years old on June 26th 1925 when she announced her discovery in her paper ‘Die Ekamangane’, she became the only woman in her era apart from Marie Curie to be credited with the discovery of an element. She was also a woman who, because of chauvinism and institutional arrogance of the time, was never fully paid for her work. Ida later recalled that when she presented her results to the Association of German Chemists, the chair noted that she was the first ‘female colleague’ to address the association.
And in the spirit of chemical discovery — and to end with a bang — Professor Martyn Poliakoff of the University of
Nottingham launched his latest Rhenium Periodic Video, one of a series of videos that have been seen by millions of young chemists all over the world. See www.periodicvideos.com
If you would like a copy of the magazine that accompanied this event, please send a request to lipmann@lipmann.co.uk
By Anthony Lipmann
