This Day in Science History - August 17 - Walter Noddack

August 17th is Walter Noddack's birthday. Noddack was a German chemist who discovered the element rhenium with Ida Tacke (who would later become Ida Noddack) and Otto Berg. These three chemists also thought they discovered another element they called masurium. They had been bombarding a mineral called columbite with electrons and analyzing the x-ray energies given off by the resulting compound. One set of energies related to the theoretical values associated with eka-manganese on Mendelev's periodic table. Their results were never reproduced by others and the claim was never verified. Eka-manganese would be eventually artificially produced by a particle accelerator by Emilio G. Segr? and named technetium, after the Greek word for 'artificial'.

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