Ida Tacke was born in Lackhausen (nowadays a part of the city of Wesel) in the northern Rhine region in 1896.

She described how she picked her path of study by stating, "since I did not want to be a teacher at all, and research and industry employed proportionally fewer physicists at that time, I decided to become a chemist– a decision that was welcomed by my father who owned a small varnish factory in the Lower Rhine region.

[6] In 1918, she graduated from the University with a degree in chemical and metallurgical engineering, specifically on higher aliphatic fatty acid anhydrides.

[6] After graduating, she worked in the chemistry laboratory of the Berlin turbine factory of AEG, which is a company that is affiliated with General Electric in the United States.

[10] Noddack correctly criticized Enrico Fermi's chemical proofs in his 1934 neutron bombardment experiments, from which he postulated that transuranic elements might have been produced.

In 1932, a German law, replicating others in Europe, was put into place that obligated married women to leave their jobs and become housewives so that there would be more positions available for men.

Ultimately on December 17, 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann provided chemical proof that the previously presumed transuranic elements were isotopes of barium, and Hahn wrote these exciting results to his exiled colleague Lise Meitner, explaining the process as a 'bursting' of the uranium nucleus into lighter elements.

Frisch also experimentally verified the fission reaction by means of a cloud chamber, confirming the energy release.

Element 43 was definitively isolated in 1937 by Emilio Segrè and Carlo Perrier from a discarded piece of molybdenum foil from a cyclotron which had undergone beta decay.

No isotope of technetium has a half-life longer than 4.2 million years and was presumed to have disappeared on Earth as a naturally occurring element.

[24] Based on this discovery, Belgian physicist Pieter van Assche constructed an analysis of their data to show that the detection limit of Noddacks' analytical method[clarification needed] could have been 1000 times lower than the 10−9 value reported in their paper, in order to show the Noddacks could have been the first to find measurable amounts of element 43, as the ores they had analyzed contained uranium.

"[26] Gunter Herrmann from the University of Mainz examined van Assche's arguments, and concluded they were developed ad hoc, and forced to a predetermined result.

[36] Ida Noddack was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry due to her discovery of rhenium and masurium.