Working with fellow chemist Walter Noddack (her future husband) and X-ray specialist Otto Berg , Ida Tacke discovered element 75 , rhenium, in 1925, thus solving one of the mysteries of the periodic table of elements introduced by Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev in 1869. Ida Tacke Noddack's continuing study of the periodic table also led her to be the first to suggest in 1934 that physicist Enrico Fermi had not made a new element in an experiment with uranium as he thought, but instead had discovered nuclear fission. Her prediction was not verified until 1939.

Ida Tacke was born in Germany on February 25, 1896 and studied at the Technical University in Berlin, where she received the first prize for chemistry and metallurgy in 1919. In 1921, soon after receiving her doctorate, she set out to isolate two of the elements that Mendeleev had predicted when he proposed the Periodic System and displayed all known elements in a...