McCoy, Herbert

Herbert Newby McCoy, 1870-1945. American chemist who made outstanding contributions to radioactivity and the chemistry of the lare earths In 1904 he showed that indium is produced by spontaneous transmutation of uranium Three years later, m collaboration with W. H. Ross, he pointed out the identical chemical behavior of the compounds of certain elements which F Soddy later called isotopes. Dr McCoy also gave the first quantitative proof that the o-ray activity of uranium compounds is directly proportional to their uranium content (78). 

He found that freshly prepared thorium salts have a normal radioactivity which decreases to a minimum in 4.6 years. He computed that the undiscovered member ought to have a half-life period of five and one-half years, and two chemists at the University of Chicago, Herbert N. McCoy (100) and William H. Ross, later verified this prediction. The new element was at first called mesothorium, but is now known as mesothorium 1 (20, 63), the name having been changed because Hahn... 

Herbert Newby McCoy (1870-1945) was an Ammcan chemist who taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah and was the vice-president of Lindsay Light Chemieal Company. He contributed to numerous papers on physical chemistry, radioactivity and rate earths (Wikipedia 2015b). 

Wikipedia (2015b) Herbert Newby McCoy http //en.wikipediaorg/wiki/Herbert Newby McCoy. Accessed Mar 2015... 

Spedding s life was again to be influenced by Herbert M. McCoy but that was about nine years later in his career. 

Another strand of development came from several attempts to separate some of these new radio-elements chemically, which ended in failure. First of all, in 1907 Herbert McCoy and WiUiam Ross concluded that, in the case of thorium and radiothorium, Our experiments strongly indicate that radiothorium is entirely inseparable from thorium by chemical processes, " a comment Soddy considered the first definitive statement of the chemical inseparability of what were soon to be called isotopes. Soddy himself wrote in the same year that there seemed to be no known method of separating thorium X from mesothorium.They were in fact two isotopes of thorium. Similar cases began to multiply. Bertram Boltwood discovered the radio-element ionium, which could not be chemically separated from thorium. In another famous case, Hevesy and Paneth were asked by Rutherford to try to separate radio-lead from ordinary lead and likewise failed to do so, in spite of using 20 different chemical methods. Their work was not entirely in vain, however, since it led to the development of the use of radioactive tracers, which have become an indispensable tool in modem chemistry and biochemistry. 

---