The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb

The Discovery of Fission: Hahn and Strassmann

The radiochemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann were bombarding elements with neutrons in their Berlin laboratory when they made an unexpected discovery. They found that while the nuclei of most elements changed somewhat during neutron bombardment, uranium nuclei changed greatly and broke into two roughly equal pieces. They split and became not the new transuranic elements that some thought Fermi had discovered but radioactive barium isotopes (barium has the atomic number 56) and fragments of the uranium itself. The substances Fermi had created in his experiments, that is, did more than resemble lighter elements; they were lighter elements. Importantly, the products of the Hahn-Strassmann experiment weighed less than that of the original uranium nucleus, and herein lay the primary significance of their findings. For it followed from Einstein's equation that the loss of mass resulting from the splitting process must have been converted into energy in the form of kinetic energy that could in turn be converted into heat. Calculations made by Hahn's former colleague, Lise Meitner, a refugee from Nazism then staying in Sweden, and her nephew, Otto Frisch, led to the conclusion that so much energy had been released that a previously undiscovered kind of process was at work. Frisch, borrowing the term for cell division in biology-binary fission-named the process fission.⁸ For his part, Fermi had produced fission in 1934 but had not recognized it.

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