Freidrich Dorn | Biography

Friedrich Ernst Dorn was the German physicist who discovered radon in 1900, although his discovery was nearly ignored. Dorn's announcement of his findings came upon the same time as English physicist William Ramsay revealed his the discoveries of the five other noble gases. Ramsay had already predicted the existence of radon and even specified some of its characteristics. Ramsay and his associate Whytlaw-Gray later established radon's atomic weight in a very intricate experiment. The discovery of radon was Dorn's only contribution to chemistry. Although Ramsay was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904 for his work leading to the discovery of the noble gases, Dorn's achievement should not be diminished. It was unique in the history of chemistry because Dorn noted that radon develops as an emission of radium. This is the first time that one element has been shown to transmutate from another. This finding is not on the same scale as turning common metals into gold, but it brings chemistry back to the founding concept of alchemy from which chemistry evolved.

Friedrich Dorn was born in what is now Dobre Miastro in Poland. Like Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, he attended college at Königsberg but Dorn was there a generation (around twenty years) after Kirchhoff. In 1873, Dorn was offered a position as professor of physics at the University of Breslau and he accepted. He stayed at Breslau for thirteen years until he was offered a professorship at University at Halle. University officials promised him the chance to do research on x-rays. He conducted his x-ray research for over thirteen years before he observed the phenomenon that led to the discovery of radon. At first, he believed that he was observing the ordinarily expected radiation from radium. On closer study, he reported that radium actually emanates a radioactive gas. Once this gas was analyzed discretely, it was found to be the sixth noble gas. Dorn called his discovery "radium emanation." Ramsay eight years later gave it the name "niton." It was not given the name "radon" until 1923. This was seven years after Friedrich Dorn had died at the age of 68.

Perhaps the significance of Dorn's discovery would have remained dormant for many years if Ramsay had not isolated radon. The importance of Dorn's discovery also relied on Ramsay's work to establish the characteristics and atomic weight of the element. Still, Dorn's work was an important contribution to furthering the knowledge of what elements exist. His discovery also allowed other researchers to determine if other elements also transmutate one from another. The unique characteristic of the radium to radon transmutation affords much further research.