CEFISES Seminar: Brigitte Van Tiggelen, « It’s Not Elementary! The Successive Lives of Eka-Manganese aka Element 43 »

Livestream https://youtube.com/live/_BkMqhAqRbQ

Series: Chemistry

Speaker: Brigitte Van Tiggelen (Science History Institute)

Talk: « It’s Not Elementary! The Successive Lives of Eka-Manganese aka Element 43 »

Abstract

In 1988, a contribution appeared in the journal Nuclear Physics, signed by the Belgian nuclear chemist Pieter Van Assche with the title “The ignored discovery of the element Z = 43”. The author claimed that the Italian physicists Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè were wrongly credited with the first observation of the element with atomic number 43, and that he was providing convincing arguments that the Berlin-based research team Walter Noddack, Ida Tacke and Otto Berg who had announced to have discovered the element along with element 75 back in 1925 should in fact be credited with its discovery. Less than ten years later, a paper by the Japanese radiochemist Kenji Yoshihara published in Radiochemica acta revisited the case of nipponium, a new element that another Japanese chemist, Masataka Ogawa had claimed to have discovered in 1908. Yoshihara suggested that the new element Ogawa had isolated and observed could have been what is now called rhenium, or dvi-manganese, and not eka-manganese as initially claimed. The story of nipponium bears some similarities with that of masurium: a claimed discovery that was never confirmed, it has also caught the attention of scientists and historians alike over the last 25 years, triggering passionate debates, the unearthing of hitherto untapped historical material and the reappraisal of the scientific evidence. Masurium, nipponium, but also lucium, davyum, ilmenium, pelopium or polinium, are often mentioned in the « biography » of Tc (technetium). This talk will use this biographical approach to the chemical elements to examine what it tells about discoveries, their context and their narratives.