Frederick Soddy

English radiochemist (1877–1956)

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Lived 1877–1956, aged 79United Kingdom

United Kingdom ScientistsScientist

Wikipedia
75 languages
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Era
1877–1956
Aged 79
Awards
2
recognised works

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

He cracked the atom's secret — that radioactivity was matter changing into other matter — and then named isotopes, those atomic twins hiding in the periodic table. The Nobel came in 1921, but Soddy spent his later years tangling with economics and monetary theory, convinced the world's money was as unstable as radium.

Biography

About

Frederick Soddy was born on 2 September 1877 in England and trained as a chemist before working with Ernest Rutherford at the turn of the century. Together they showed that radioactivity wasn't just energy leaking out — it was one element transmuting into another, a nuclear reaction rewriting the periodic table. Soddy went on to prove that certain radioactive elements existed in multiple forms with different atomic weights, which he called isotopes. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry arrived in 1921 for those contributions. A polymath, he later turned his attention to statistical mechanics, finance,…

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