A Short History of Early Work on Isotopes

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.