Ida Noddack (Born: Tacke) (1896 – 1978)

Ida Tacke was born on February 25, 1896 in Wesel, Germany. She was one of the first German women to study Chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin. She completed her doctorate in 1921. From 1921 to 1923 she worked as a Chemist at the AEG corporation in Berlin. From 1924 to 1925 she was with the Siemens and Halske corporations. From 1925 – 1935 she worked at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin. It was during her time there that she speculated, in response to Enrico Fermi’s work, that neutron bombardment might cause fragmentation of the uranium nucleus, thus anticipating the work of Hahn, Strassmann and Meitner and the discovery of nuclear fission. In 1925 Ida Tacke and her future husband Walter Noddack published a paper describing their discovery of element 75 which they named Rhenium. They also announced the discovery of element 43, but that discovery was disputed and later disproved. In 1926 Ida Tacke married Walter Noddack.

From 1935 – 1941 she and her husband Walther Noddack worked at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Freiburg and from 1942 – 1944 at the University of Strassbourg. At the liberation of France they fled back to Germany and then to Turkey. They returned to Germany and were appointed to the Institute for Geochemical Research in Bamberg from 1956 – 1968.

Ida Noddack-Tacke was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but was never selected for the prize. She and her husband were awarded the Liebig Medal of the German Chemical Society in 1934 for their discovery of rhenium. Ida Noddack died on September 24, 1978 in Bad Neuenahr, Germany.