Frederick Soddy

In 1908, Soddy married Winifred Beilby, the daughter of renowned Chemist, Sir George Beilby. The couple did not have any children. If hearsays are to be believed it was Winifred’s death that led to his disenchantment with experimental science and he retired prematurely. He died on September 22, 1956 at Brighton.

A small crater on the moon has been named after Fredrick Soddy. Soddyite, a radioactive Uranium mineral, also bears his name.

Frederick Soddy was born on 2 September 1877 in Eastbourne, a seaside resort in Sussex, England. His father, Benjamin Soddy, was a corn merchant in London. Frederick was the youngest of his father’s seven children. His mother died when he was two years old and he was raised by a half sister.

Young Soddy had his schooling at Eastbourne College. Later he got admitted to University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. In 1895, he received a scholarship and shifted to Merton College, Oxford; ultimately passing out from there in 1898 with first class honors in chemistry.

In 1898, Frederick Soddy began his career as an independent researcher at Oxford. In 1900, he shifted to Canada and there he became a demonstrator in chemistry at McGill University in Montreal. Soon, he came in contact with Ernest Rutherford, who asked him to identify the thorium emanations.

Soddy and Rutherford worked together for two years on thorium and discovered a highly radioactive substance called thorium-X. They then kept on experimenting on different radioactive elements and finally in 1902, established the ‘Theory of Atomic Disintegration’.

They proposed that radioactivity was an atomic phenomenon and that radioactive emission occurs when chemical transmutations of the atoms take place. Later they demonstrated that radioactive elements behave anomalously because they have a propensity to decay and form other elements.

They also noted that such decay produces alpha, beta and gama radiation. Moreover, they also noticed gaseous emanation from thorium, but could only conclude that it was an inert gas.

Subsequently, Soddy went back to England to work with Sir William Ramsay at University College London. That was mainly because Ramsay’s laboratory was at that time the only place where he could successfully examine minute amount of rare gases.

Frederick Soddy is best remembered for his discovery of isotopes. The underlying concept of this discovery is that different elements with different atomic weight but identical chemical characteristics might be assigned to the same chemical space. He later named these elements isotopes, which in Greek means ‘the same place’, on the advice of family friend Dr. Margaret Todd.

In addition, Soddy had number of books to his credit. Apart from the above mentioned ‘The Interpretation of the Atom’, some of his more important works are 'Radioactivity’, ‘The Interpretation of Radium’, ‘The Chemistry of the Radioactive Elements’, ‘Matter and Energy’, ‘Science and Life’, ‘The Story of Atomic Energy’, and ‘Atomic Transmutation’.