Background
Masataka Ogawa was born in Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, 1865.
Masataka Ogawa was born in Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, 1865.
After graduating from the University of Tokyo (1890), he studied under William Ramsay in London, where he worked on the analysis of the rare mineral thorianite.
Ogawa Masataka extracted and isolated a small amount of an apparently unknown substance from the mineral, which he announced as the discovery of element 43, naming the newly discovered element nipponium. He published his results in 1909 and a notice was also published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. For this work, he was awarded a doctorate and the highest prize of the Tokyo Chemical Society. However, no other researchers were able to replicate his discovery, and the announcement was forgotten.
Became a professor at Tohoku University (1911) and then president (1919).