Th e element rhenium lies two places below manganese in group VII of the periodic table (fi g. 5.1). Its existence was predicted by Mendeleev when he first proposed his periodic table in 1869. This group is rather unique because when the periodic table was first published, it possessed only one known element, manganese, with at least two gaps below it. Th e first gap was eventually filled by element 43, technetium, while the second gap was filled by rhenium. But rhenium was the first to be discovered, in 1925, by Walter Noddack and Ida Tacke (later Noddack) (fi g. 5.2) and Otto Berg in Germany. In the course of an arduously long extraction, they of the ore molybdenite. The German discoverers called their element “rhenium” after Rhenus, Latin for the river Rhine, which fl owed close to the place where they were working. They also believed that they had isolated the other element missing from group 7, or element 43, which eventually became known as technetium, but this was hotly disputed by several other researchers. As recently as the early years of the twenty-first century, research teams from Belgium and the United States reanalyzed the X-ray evidence from the Noddacks and argued that they had in fact isolated element 43. But these further claims have been debated by many radiochemists and physicists and now have been laid to rest, at least for the time being. By a further odd twist of fate, the Japanese chemist Masataka Ogawa believed that he had isolated element 43 and called it nipponium even earlier, in 1908. His claim too was discredited at the time but as recently as 2004 it has been argued that he had in fact isolated rhenium rather than element 43, well before the Noddacks and Berg. Otto Hahn’s first entry into the fi eld of radioactivity was as a student of Ramsay’s at University College, London, just after the beginning of the twentieth century.
A Religious Movement on Trial: Transformative Years, Judicial Questions and the Nation of Islam
