Abstract
A brief introduction deals with the time period from Dalton to the discovery of isotopes by Soddy and Fajans in the early twentieth century which was soon followed by the invention of the mass spectrograph (1922). The next section covers the period from 1922 to the discovery of deuterium by Urey and his colleagues. It includes a discussion of isotope effects in spectroscopy, particularly band spectra of diatomic molecules, and also discusses the discovery of the important stable isotopes in the second row of the periodic table. It ends with the discovery of deuterium, probably the most “popular” isotope for isotope effect studies. The chapter ends with a short description of the “apparatus” of theory and experimentation available for isotope effect work at the time of the discovery of deuterium.
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Notes
- 1.
∗ Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics were awarded starting in 1901. In this chapter (the first mention of the name of a Nobel Laureate in the running text will be followed by the notation (NLP xxxx ∗ ) or (NLCxxxx ∗ ) where NLP and NLC stand for Nobel Laureate Physics and Nobel Laureate Chemistry respectively while xxxx notes the year of the award.
- 2.
The reference to keltium is to a rare element which the French chemist G. Urbain claimed to have discovered. Moseley was able convince Urbain that keltium did not exist (Heilbronn 1974).
- 3.
While we have not carefully studied all of the tabular material in Moseley’s papers, we note that Moseley’s atomic numbers agree with the values accepted today, with one exception. Thus, Moseley assigns N = 66 to Ho and N = 67 to Dy; the presently accepted assignment reverses these two elements in the periodic table.
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Wolfsberg, M., Van Hook, W.A., Paneth, P. (2009). A Short History of Early Work on Isotopes. In: Isotope Effects. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2265-3_1
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