Ida Eva Tacke Noddack was born on the 25th of February in 1896, off the shores of Rhine River in Lackausen bei Wesel (at the time, the region was part of Rhenish Prussia) (Dorothy & Ogilvie, 2000). Her father was an industrialist who manufactured lacquer and varnish goods in Lackhausen (Habashi, 1997); there is little known of her mother, Hedwig Danner.
Ida was a brilliant young woman with a natural aptitude in the physical sciences. She began her elementary schooling in Wesel from 1902 to 1912 and then moved on to high school in Aachen from 1912-1915 (Habashi, 1997). After completing her degree, Ida enrolled in college at the Technische Hochschule (now known as University of Berlin) in Charlottenburg. There she studied chemistry and obtained an engineering degree by 1919 (Habashi, 1997). Ida was also recognized with a top prize in chemistry and metallurgy and would go on to achieve a doctorate degree in engineering by 1921, under Professor D. Holde (Dorothy & Ogilvie, 2000). Her topic of study for the doctoral thesis was on anhydrides of high molecular weight fatty acids; a topic what would eventually lose her attention.
After successfully completing her doctorate degree, Ida moved onto professions in the industrial chemical world of Berlin. Her first career opportunity would be a three year extent (1921-1923) at the Allgemeine Elektrizitat Gesellschaft and then a quick two years (1924-1925) at Siemens-Halske (Habashi, 1997). Then in 1925, Ida again moved onto another job for a German government research laboratory: Imperial Physico-Technical Research Office, a facility in which Dr. Walter Noddack was the head chemist of the laboratory (Habashi, 1997). Here, Walter and Ida collaborated on a systematic inquiry of the missing elements of the periodic table (Dorothy & Ogilvie, 2000). Ida and Walter were in search for the elusive elements, 43 and 75. It was predicted in 1896, that these elements did indeed exist by Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, a Russian chemist who organized the structure of the current periodic table (Habashi, 1997).
As Ida and Walter became evermore entrenched in the pursuits of find the missing elements, so too did the interest develop in each other. Who really knows how the love affair blossomed, it may have been the close proximity of the laboratory environment, or the long daunting hours of intellectual pursuit for suspected chemical elements, but nevertheless, there was indeed obvious chemistry going on that was completely undetectable by an instruments being used; the two would go onto marry in 1926 (Dorothy & Ogilvie, 2000).
Just prior to the wedding bells, Ida and Walter indubitably discovered element 75 in June, 1925. They used an x-ray technique which analyzes the periodicity of the wavelength emitted by the chemical being studied. Upon discovering element 75, Ida and Walter would name it rhenium after the River Rhein. This indeed was the missing dvi-manganese element (Habashi, 1997). During subsequent year, they produced the first gram of the metal and wrote many scientific papers with specific detail about the properties of the metal. One such paper would only be authored by Ida Noddack herself, suggesting that she performed the primary duty in completing the studies of the new element (Habashi, 1997).
