  It has at times been indicated that Landau introduced neutron stars in his
classic paper of 1932. This is clearly impossible because the discovery of the
neutron by Chadwick was submitted more than one month after Landau's work.
Therefore, and according to his calculations, what Landau really did was to
study white dwarfs, and the critical mass he obtained clearly matched the value
derived by Stoner and later by Chandrasekhar. The birth of the concept of a
neutron star is still today unclear. Clearly, in 1934, the work of Baade and
Zwicky pointed to neutron stars as originating from supernovae. Oppenheimer in
1939 is also well known to have introduced general relativity (GR) in the study
of neutron stars. The aim of this note is to point out that the crucial idea
for treating the neutron star has been advanced in Newtonian theory by Gamow.
However, this pioneering work was plagued by mistakes. The critical mass he
should have obtained was $6.9\,M_\odot$, not the one he declared, namely, $1.5\
M_\odot$. Probably, he was taken to this result by the work of Landau on white
dwarfs. We revise Gamow's calculation of the critical mass regarding
calculational and conceptual aspects and discuss whether it is justified to
consider it the first neutron-star critical mass. We compare Gamow's approach
to other early and modern approaches to the problem.
