30/05/2024
Jewish Emigres and the Manhattan Project: Leo Szilard
Hungarian physicist and inventor, Leo Szilard, was born in Budapest to middle-class Jewish parents in 1898. He moved to Berlin in 1919 where he received his PhD in physics in 1922. An avid inventor, Szilard patented numerous technical innovations, including working with Albert Einstein on the Einstein refrigerator, which had no moving parts.
When Adolf Hi**er came to power in 1933, N**i racial laws forced Szilard to resign his university professorship and move to England where he first conceived of the idea of nuclear chain reaction. Always the visionary, Szilard worked tirelessly to help find suitable positions for many fleeing German scientists, working with the Academic Assistance Council, a London-based group headed by Ernest Rutherford.
Szilard moved to the United States in 1938 and began working at Columbia University with Enrico Fermi. In late 1939, he drafted the famous Einstein-Szilard letter to President Roosevelt prompting the US federal government involvement in uranium research for atomic weapons development, which ultimately led to the creation of the Manhattan Project.
In February 1940, he published his breakthrough manuscript on creating a nuclear chain reaction. Szilard was with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942, when the experimental nuclear reactor CP-1 went critical—
creating the first ever controlled nuclear chain reaction.
In 1945, he wrote a petition advocating for a demonstration of the atomic bomb before it was dropped on cities, but his petition was ignored. Szilard passed away in San Diego, California on May 30, 1964.
Learn more about Leo Szilard: Manhattan Project Scientists: Leo Szilard (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)
Image caption: Szilard and Einstein review the draft of the1939 letter to President Roosevelt that resulted in the creation of the Manhattan Project.
Credit: public domain
