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Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-born physicist and inventor who conceived the nuclear chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project. He also contributed to biology, information theory, and nuclear disarmament.
Learn about Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born American physicist who helped initiate the Manhattan Project and the first nuclear reactor. Find out his role in isotopic fractionation, atomic bomb development, and international control of nuclear weapons.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Early Life
- Education and Early Research
- The Nuclear Chain Reaction
- The Manhattan Project
- The Voice of The Dolphins
- Personal Life
- Cancer and Death
- Sources and Further Reference
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Leo Szilard was born Leo Spitz on February 11, 1898, in Budapest, Hungary. A year later, his Jewish parents, civil engineer Louis Spitz and Tekla Vidor, changed the family’s surname from the German “Spitz” to the Hungarian “Szilard.” Even during high school, Szilard showed an aptitude for physics and mathematics, winning a national prize for mathem...
Forced to return to Budapest to recover from the dreaded Spanish Influenza of 1918, Szilard never saw battle. After the war, he briefly returned to school in Budapest, but transferred to the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, Germany, in 1920. He soon changed schools and majors, studying physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he ...
Faced with the threat of the Nazi Party’s anti-Semitic policy and harsh treatment of Jewish academics, Szilard left Germany in 1933. After living briefly in Vienna, he arrived in London in 1934. While experimenting with chain reactions at London’s St. Bartholomew's Hospital, he discovered a method of separating the radioactive isotopes of iodine. T...
In January 1938, with the impending war in Europe threatening his work, if not his very life, Szilard immigrated to the United States, where he continued his research in nuclear chain reactions while teaching at New York’s Columbia University. When news reached America in 1939 that German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had discovered nuc...
In 1961, Szilard published a collection of his own short stories, “The Voice of the Dolphins,” in which he predicts moral and political issues to be triggered by the proliferation of atomic weapons in the year 1985. The title refers to a group of Russian and American scientists who in translating the language of dolphins found that their intelligen...
Szilard married physician Dr. Gertrud (Trude) Weiss on October 13, 1951, in New York City. The couple had no known surviving children. Before his marriage to Dr. Weiss, Szilard had been an unmarried life partner of Berlin opera singer Gerda Philipsborn during the 1920s and 1930s.
After being diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1960, Szilard underwent radiation therapy at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, using a cobalt 60 treatment regimen Szilard himself had designed. After a second round of treatment in 1962, Szilard was declared cancer-free. The Szilard-designed cobalt therapy is still used for the treatment of ...
Lanoutte, William. Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb. University of Chicago Press (1992). ISBN-10: 0226468887Learn about Leo Szilard's life, achievements, and legacy in nuclear science and peace. He developed the nuclear chain reaction, patented the first nuclear reactor, and opposed the use of atomic bombs in war.
- Robert Longley
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Oct 4, 2013 · Leo Szilard was the man who first realised that nuclear power could be used to build a bomb of terrifying proportions. Lisa Jardine considers what his story has to say...
Learn about Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor who developed the idea of the nuclear chain reaction and helped initiate the Manhattan Project. Explore his early life, World War II involvement, and later work in molecular biology.
Szilard's Migration Story from Hungary to the U.S. Szilard took on German citizenship in 1930 while retaining his Hungarian one. When Hitler came to power, Szilard fled Germany.
Learn about Leo Szilard, who was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1898 and became a US citizen in 1940. He was a key player in the development of the atomic bomb, but also advocated for limited nuclear weapons and peaceful use of nuclear power.
