He is credited, along with others, with the discovery of the element protactinium in 1917. This decay also produced alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. It needed careful work by Soddy and Rutherford to prove that atomic transmutation was in fact occurring. She actively participated in his research in Glasgow on gamma rays emitted by radioactive atoms and helped with his isotope work. Frederick Soddy, English chemist and recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for investigating radioactive substances and for elaborating the theory of isotopes. In 1895 he obtained a scholarship at Merton College, Oxford, from which University he graduated in 1898 with first class honours in chemistry. Frederick Soddy Biographical F rederick Soddy, the son of Benjamin Soddy, a London merchant, was born at Eastbourne, Sussex, England, on September 2, 1877.He was educated at Eastbourne College and the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. They had no children. Frederick Soddy Soddy married Winifred Beilby, the daughter of Sir George Beilby, in 1908. He was educated in Wales and at the In 1900 he became a demonstrator in chemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he worked with Ernest Rutherford on radioactivity. He and Rutherford realized that the anomalous behaviour of radioactive elements was because they decayed into other elements.

Frederick Soddy (1877-1956) The Radio-elements and the Periodic Law Chemical News 107, 97-9 (1913). When radioactivity was first discovered, no one was sure what the cause was.

During this time here his work led to the theory of isotopes which was published in 1913. In 1913, Frederick Soddy proposed the concept that a radioactive element can have more than one atomic weight and occupy the same place (isotope, from the Greek meaning “same place”) in the periodic table although the chemical properties are identical.