Otto Berg (chemist)

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Otto Berg (born November 23, 1873 in Berlin ; † 1939 ) was a German chemist . In 1925 he was involved in the discovery of element 75, rhenium , by Walter Noddack and Ida Tacke , as well as the non-officially recognized discovery of element 43, which the research team named Masurium at the time (today Technetium ).

Life

From 1894 to 1898 Berg studied chemistry in Berlin, Heidelberg and Freiburg im Breisgau . In the years 1902–1911 he worked as a private lecturer in Greifswald . He then became an employee of Siemens & Halske in Berlin-Charlottenburg .

As a specialist in X-ray radiation , he supported Walter Noddack and Ida Tacke (after their marriage, Ida Noddack ) in their search for the last still unknown natural elements, namely those with the ordinal numbers 43 and 75. In 1925 the team reported the discovery of both elements; they called them Masurium and Rhenium . The rhenium could be detected in spectra and separated in an amount of 1 g. Despite the X-ray spectroscopic evidence, which, according to the team , showed the element 43 masurium in 28 of 1000 spectra and in 70 cases with a high degree of probability , Noddack, Tacke and Berg were denied recognition because they could not isolate the element and the signals - on the limit of detectability - could not be reproduced.

The recognized discovery came in 1937 by Emilio Segrè and Carlo Perrier , who gave it the name Technetium . This name was officially established at the 1949 IUPAC conference.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 1925 magazine Popular Science, Discovery of Masurium and Rhenium
  2. ↑ Short biography of Otto Berg (Dutch) ( Memento from January 15, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  3. ^ Hans Georg Tilgner: Research. Search and Addiction .: A biography of Walter Noddack Ida Noddack-Tacke. 2000, ISBN 3898112721
  4. ↑ Peter Schneider: An elementary discovery , spectrum direct, edition of February 4, 2000
personal data
SURNAME Berg, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist
DATE OF BIRTH November 23, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 1939