A Short History of Early Work on Isotopes

Abstract A brief introduction deals with the time period from Dalton to the discovery of isotopes by Soddy and Fajans in the early twentieth century which was soon followed by the invention of the mass spectrograph (1922). The next section covers the period from 1922 to the discovery of deuterium by Urey and his colleagues. It includes a discussion of isotope effects in spectroscopy, particularly band spectra of diatomic molecules, and also discusses the discovery of the important stable isotopes in the second row of the periodic table. It ends with the discovery of deuterium, probably the most popular isotope for isotope effect studies. The chapter ends with a short description of the apparatus of theory and experimentation available for isotope effect work at the time of the discovery of deuterium. 

The concept of the atom as the smallest particle of matter (from the Greek word for indivisible) was promulgated by John Dalton about 1803. Within about a century and a quarter of scientific investigation which will be briefly described in this chapter, this concept yielded the idea of the periodic table and the understanding of the periodic table including the nuclear atom, the concept of isotopes, and the discovery of the majority of the isotopes which are used in the studies of the isotope effects. It is appropriate to point out that this book deals with the study of the effect of isotopic substitution on the physical and chemical properties of molecular (or atomic) systems. The book does not deal with the use of isotopes as tracers, a use which usually depends on the assumption that isotope effects are small and can be ignored in tracer studies. 

Wolfsberg et at., Isotope Effects in the Chemical, Geological, and Bio Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2265-3 l, Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

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