Frederick Soddy
English radiochemist (1877-1956) · United Kingdom · Scientists · Died at 79
Frederick Soddy is read about 91 times a day, in 75 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 22 October 2026
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Something wrong?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.
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, As scientific men we have all, no doubt, felt that our work has been put often to base uses, which must lead to disaster.
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About this person
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, and economics, arguing that monetary systems were fundamentally flawed. He died on 22 September 1956.
Scientists from the United Kingdom 6
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