Author: SODDY, Fredk [Frederick].
Title: Radio-Activity: an elementary treatise, from the standpoint of the disintegration theory.
Description: London, The Electrician 1904. Octavo publisher's cloth; xii,214pp & publisher's list, illustrations and diagrams through the text. Owner's stamp on an endpaper, a couple of spots; a very good copy. ¶ First edition. Soddy's work with Rutherford resulted in the formulation of the theory of atomic disintegration, demonstrated later with Ramsay. In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (Einstein won for physics in the same year) for his work on isotopes but he had already given up, some years before, serious work in the field and he devoted much of the rest of his life to cranky economic, social and political polemic. Soddy always ran second. Rutherford's 'Radio-Activity' was finished a little earlier; is considered the first text-book on the subject; was published by Cambridge University rather than The Electrician and went into a second edition the next year while this never did. And so it went on. But this may have less to do with his crankiness than his innate nature and there is no sign of it yet here. In this he is graceful and grateful to his predecessors and teachers.

Keywords: science chemistry atomic physics radioactivity c20th England