Frederick Soddy FRS was an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions.
20 Facts About Frederick Soddy
2.
Frederick Soddy proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements.
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Frederick Soddy was born at 6 Bolton Road, Eastbourne, England, the son of Benjamin Frederick Soddy, corn merchant, and his wife Hannah Green.
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Frederick Soddy went to school at Eastbourne College, before going on to study at University College of Wales at Aberystwyth and at Merton College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1898 with first class honours in chemistry.
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Frederick Soddy was a researcher at Oxford from 1898 to 1900.
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In 1903, with Sir William Ramsay at University College London, Frederick Soddy showed that the decay of radium produced helium gas.
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From 1904 to 1914, Frederick Soddy was a lecturer at the University of Glasgow.
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In May 1910 Frederick Soddy was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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In 1913, Frederick Soddy showed that an atom moves lower in atomic number by two places on alpha emission, higher by one place on beta emission.
10.
In 1913 Frederick Soddy described the phenomenon in which a radioactive element may have more than one atomic mass though the chemical properties are identical.
11.
Frederick Soddy published The Interpretation of Radium and Atomic Transmutation.
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Frederick Soddy received the 1921 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research in radioactive decay and particularly for his formulation of the theory of isotopes.
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In Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt Frederick Soddy praises Wells's The World Set Free.
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Frederick Soddy says that radioactive processes probably power the stars.
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Frederick Soddy wrote that financial debts grew exponentially at compound interest but the real economy was based on exhaustible stocks of fossil fuels.
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In Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt, Frederick Soddy cited the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as evidence for the belief, which was relatively widespread at the time, of a "financial conspiracy to enslave the world".
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Frederick Soddy rediscovered the Descartes' theorem in 1936 and published it as a poem, "The Kiss Precise", quoted at Problem of Apollonius.
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Frederick Soddy received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921 and the same year he was elected member of the International Atomic Weights Committee.
19.
In 1908, Frederick Soddy married Winifred Moller Beilby, the daughter of industrial chemist Sir George Beilby and Lady Emma Bielby, a philanthropist to women's causes.
20.
Frederick Soddy died in Brighton, England in 1956, twenty days after his 79th birthday.