RHENIUM AND MASURIUM.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 184, 6 August 1925, Page 17

RHENIUM AND MASURIUM.

DIFFER FROM HAFNIUM.

EST THEIR GREATER RARITY.

(From Our owo Correspondent.)

; H ' :; ■ -p. • LONDON/June 29. There was considerable excitement -when Professor Niels Bohr the distinguished Danish physicist pupil of and collaborator with Sir Ernest Rutherford, I discovered . a new element which he named hafnium, in honour of the Danish name of Copenhagen. Now we have to record the discovery of two of the five missing elements from,the 92, regarded as existing. This new discovery is the -work of two German scientists, a man, Dr. Walter Noddack, and a woman, Dr. Ida Tache.

These two scientists'disclaim any practical value for their discovery, and Dr. Noddack.ascribes the greater part of the credit to his woman colleague, who is not -yet .thirty. The naming of' these scientific babies lias proved as great a difficulty, as it is for.parents of independent, views over their first born. Chivalry was brought into play, and Dr. Tache chose the names Rhenium and Masurium. "I chose them," said' Dr. Tache, "because it is natural, unless one chooses a combination taken from--the Greek', to name a new discovery either after the,person or the place where it.was"found. , Now, I am not a Greek scholar, neither is-Dr. Noddack. An element called 'Genoa-: niuni'v exists already. 'Our friends 'were helpful with such suggestions as _erolineum,' seeing that we work in Berlin. But I was born in the Rhineland, and I think this province is the most typical of things German. That accounts for 'Rhenium.' When I looked rf or something to balance this in the east of the-Reich, the beauty of the Masurian lakes and the typicalness of that landscape for the east of Prussia, was the immediate thought. Rut of course, no name can be said to be permanent, until approved by the international committee on atomic weights which meets in Paris.

"Contrary to Hafnium, the last ele-ments-discovered, these two only combine in infinitesimal proportions in the ores in which they occur. Chemically, they are related to manganese, a metal not so very dissimilar to iron, yet their properties resemble those of platinum' and osmium. The next thing we have to do, of course, is to extract' them in. such quantities from the ores in which' they occur that;an exact knowledge of their properties may,, be gained,; which is only possible when we have tHem in:a "pure form. The. fact that they have, been found constitutes a new affirmation of the periodic law of. Mendeleef,'just as in-the case of Hafnium. But-they certainly will not be found to occur much oftener than'radium. To people who have no idea of chemistry and physics at alii it will perhaps give a clearer idea of elements as components of all existing compounds, when I suggest that- these two new ones do not make up more than one billionth part of the earth's crust. According to the periodic law which regulates the system under which elements are sought for, there are now only.three to be found. One of these is a very light metal, another a relative of iodine, and the third an earthy mineral." -.