Frederick Soddy

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Frederick Soddy in 1922.

Frederick Soddy (2 September 1877 – 22 September 1956) was an English radiochemist.

Soddy was born in Eastbourne, England. He went to school at Eastbourne College, before going on to study at University College of Wales at Aberystwyth and at Merton College, University of Oxford. He was a researcher at Oxford from 1898 to 1900. He married Winifred Beilby in 1908.

In 1900 he became a demonstrator in chemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he worked with Ernest Rutherford on radioactivity. He and Rutherford realized that the anomalous behaviour of radioactive elements was due to the fact that they decayed into other elements. This decay also produced alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. When radioactivity was first discovered, no one was sure what the cause was. It needed careful work by Soddy and Rutherford to prove that atomic transmutation was in fact occurring.

His work and essays popularising the new understanding of radioactivity was the main inspiration for H. G. Wells's 1914 The World Set Free, which features atomic bombs dropped from biplanes in a war set many years in the future. Wells's novel is also known as The Last War and imagines a peaceful world emerging from the chaos. In Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt Soddy praises Wells’s The World Set Free. He also says that radioactive processes probably power the stars.

In 1903, with Sir William Ramsay at University College London, Soddy verified that the decay of radium produced helium.

From 1904 to 1914, he was a lecturer at the University of Glasgow and while there he showed that uranium decays to radium. It was here also that he showed that a radioactive element may have more than one atomic mass though the chemical properties are identical; this led to the concept of an isotope. Soddy later showed that non-radioactive elements also could have multiple isotopes. In addition he showed that an atom moves lower in atomic number by two places on alpha emission, higher by one place on beta emission. This was a fundamental step toward understanding the relationships among families of radioactive elements.

Soddy published The Interpretation of Radium (1909) and Atomic Transmutation (1953).

In 1914 he was appointed to a chair at the University of Aberdeen, where he worked on research related to World War I.

In 1919 he moved to Oxford University as Dr Lee's Professor of Chemistry, where, in the period up till 1936, he reorganized the laboratories and the syllabus in chemistry.

He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research in radioactive decay and particularly for his formulation of the theory of isotopes.

Frederick was also interested in technocracy and the social credit movement, which is evidenced by his publications Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt (George Allen & Unwin 1926) and Money versus Man (1933).

He died in Brighton, England.

[edit] Bibliography

Radioactivity (1904)
The Interpretation of Radium (1909) (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries; DjVu & layered PDF format)
The Chemistry of the Radioactive Elements (1912-1914)
Matter and Energy (1912)
Science and Life (1920)
Wealth, virtual wealth and debt. The solution of the economic paradox (1926)
The Interpretation of the Atom (1932)
Money versus Man (1933)
The Story of Atomic Energy (1949)
Atomic Transmutation (1953)