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Leo Szilard (/ ˈsɪlɑːrd /; Hungarian: Szilárd Leó [ˈsilaːrd ˈlɛoː]; born Leó Spitz; February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian-born physicist and inventor who made numerous important discoveries in nuclear physics and the biological sciences. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and patented the idea in 1936.
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Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-born American physicist who helped conduct the first sustained nuclear chain reaction and was instrumental in initiating the Manhattan Project for the development of the atomic bomb.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor who developed the idea of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933. He was instrumental in the beginning of the Manhattan Project, writing the letter for Albert Einstein’s signature in 1939 encouraging the US to begin building the atomic bomb.
- 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
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: 0226468887- Robert Longley
After several visits to the U.S. in 1931, 1935, and 1937, he filed a declaration of intention to become a U.S. citizen. He then landed in New York to stay in January 1938, filed a petition for naturalization in 1942, and became a U.S. citizen on March 29, 1943.
In 1943, Szilard became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. By 1945, it was clear that the U.S. was planning to use the bomb against Japan. Szilard began a campaign against its use. He circulated petitions among the scientists demanding greater scientific input on the future use of atomic weapons.
Szilard was the chief physicist at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory from February 1942 to July 1946. He worked for Arthur H. Compton, the head of the Met Lab. Szilard helped build Chicago Pile-1, the first neutronic reactor to achieve a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
