August 17
th 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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