Four Presentation Copy Papers on Hafnium

1951. First Edition. George de Hevesy's career encompassed both the discovery of a new element and the founding of isotopic tracer methodology, the latter earning him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1943. His identification of hafnium in 1923, carried out in collaboration with the physicist Dirk Coster at Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, resolved a long-contested problem in periodic classification: it provided experimental confirmation of Bohr's prediction that element 72 should be a zirconium analogue rather than a rare earth, and a decisive refutation of Urbain's celtium claim, which had gone unchallenged for more than a decade. That the identification depended on X-ray spectroscopy rather than classical chemical analysis reflects the broader transformation of inorganic chemistry then underway, in which physical instrumentation was remaking the discipline's most fundamental methods. The four presentation copies offered here trace that work with unusual completeness: the original 1923 announcement marshalling spectroscopic and chemical evidence simultaneously against a competing priority claim and in support of Bohr's atomic theory; a technically precise 1925 paper demonstrating that a century of zirconium atomic weight determinations had been silently compromised by undetected hafnium contamination; a 1936 retrospective surveying the full evidentiary and theoretical basis of the discovery; and a 1951 contribution to a Festschrift for Manne Siegbahn in which Hevesy provides his most extended account of the episode, reconstructing the experimental sequence in detail and situating it within the history of atomic theory and analytical chemistry with the authority of three intervening decades. [with] Dirk Coster. "On the New Element Hafnium; reprinted from Nature, February 24, 1923." Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, 1923. Offprint, small 8vo bifolium (176 × 118mm), pp. 3, [1]. Presentation copy.

"The Atomic Weights of Zirconium and Hafnium; reprinted from Nature, March 7, 1925." Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, 1925. Offprint, single leaf, printed on both sides, 8vo (223 × 144mm). Presentation copy.

"The Discovery of Hafnium; reprinted from Current Science, Vol. V, No. 5, pp. 236–240, 1936." Bangalore: Indian Academy of Sciences, 1936. Offprint, 4to (246 × 186mm), pp. [1], 4, [1]. Presentation copy.

"Historical Notes on the Discovery of Hafnium; in Arkiv för Kemi, Band 3, Nr. 58, pp. 543–548, 1951." Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri AB, 1951. Offprint, 8vo (241 × 170mm), pp. 6. Presentation copy.

Individual papers fully described HERE.