The Plague Spreads to Austria and Italy

Hitler annexed Austria to Germany on March 15, 1938. Erwin Schrödinger, in Graz, soon regretted having applauded this and fled to Dublin. Stefan Meyer pre-emptively resigned his professorship in Vienna. Marietta Blau, discoverer of cosmic-ray disintegration “stars,” immigrated to Mexico. Polonium expert Elizabeth Rona immigrated to America. Renowned Lise Meitner escaped to Stockholm, where she received little scientific or personal support. Mussolini’s Fascist Italy adopted Nazi racial policies and enacted anti-Semitic laws in the fall of 1938. Bruno Rossi, dismissed from his professorship in Padua, immigrated with his wife to England and then to America. Emilio Segrè relinquished his professorship in Palermo and immigrated with his wife and young son to America. Enrico Fermi, his Jewish wife Laura, and their two children, went to Stockholm where he received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics and then immigrated to America to begin what Laura Fermi called the process of Americanization.

Element 43—Technetium

Element 43 (fig. 6.1) holds a special distinction among the seven elements of this book. It was one of just four elements that Mendeleev first predicted in his famous table and article of 1871. This fact is not so well known, as most accounts mention just the three famous predictions, namely empty spaces to which Mendeleev gave atomic weights of 44, 68, and 72. These three elements were all discovered within a period of fifteen years and named scandium, gallium, and germanium, respectively. But in the same early table, Mendeleev assigned an atomic weight to just one more empty space, which he placed below manganese. Mendeleev predicted that it would have an atomic weight of 100, although he changed it slightly to 99 in his book, The Principles of Chemistry . Given the success of Mendeleev’s first three predictions it is hardly surprising that strenuous efforts were made, in many parts of the world, to find the fourth element. Little did these early chemists know the problems they would encounter in trying to isolate this particularly rare and unstable element. In the early twentieth century, several claims were made for the discovery of the element. But these alleged elements, given various names such as davyum, illenium, lucium, and nipponium all turned out to be spurious. Then, in 1925, as mentioned in the last chapter, Otto Berg, Walter Noddack, and Ida Tacke (later Ida Noddack), claimed to have discovered not just one but two new members of group 7, which they named masurium and rhenium. Although their discovery of rhenium was accepted, their claim for the element directly below manganese has been bitterly disputed ever since. The official discovery of element 43 is accorded to Emilio Segrè and coworkers. Technetium, as they eventually called it, had to be synthesized rather than isolated from naturally occurring sources. It is also the only element to ever be “discovered” in Italy—in Palermo, Sicily, to be more precise. Segrè , who had been a visitor at the Berkeley cyclotron facility in California, was sent some molybdenum plates that had been irradiated for several months with a deuterium beam. Various chemical analyses by the Italian team revealed a new element, which could be extracted by boiling with sodium hydroxide that also contained a small amount of hydrogen peroxide.