In July 1914—shortly before the outbreak of World War I in August—Hahn was called to active duty with the army in a "Landwehr" regiment. Meitner undertook X-ray technician training, and a course on anatomy at the city hospital in Lichterfelde. Meanwhile, she completed both the work on the beta ray spectrum that she had begun before the war with Hahn and Baeyer, and her own study of the uranium decay chain. In July 1915, she returned to Vienna, where she joined the Austrian Army as an X-ray nurse-technician. Her unit was soon deployed to the Eastern front in Poland, and she also served on the Italian front for a while before being discharged in September 1916.
World War I and the discovery of protactinium
Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner | World War I and the discovery of protactinium
She completed the work on beta ray spectrum that she had begun with Hahn and Baeyer, and also her own study of the uranium decay chain. Discoveries of the element protactinium and nuclear fission Discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. Clarification of the process of uranium fission—how it originates and that it produces so much energy
who was lise meitner?
user
She was an Austrian-Swedish physicist.
assistant
in which country did she live in her early days?
user
In the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna
assistant
any particular educational institution that she attended as a student?
user
University of Vienna
assistant
why did she have to flee from germany?
user
Because she lost her Austrian citizenship.
assistant
why?
user
Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context.
assistant
can you mention any of her contributions?
user
With Giesel's help, she was able to produce a pure product that was strongly radioactive. By December 1917 she was able to isolate both the mother isotope and its actinium daughter product. She submitted their findings for publication in March 1918.
Lise Meitner | World War I and the discovery of protactinium
The export of uranium from Austria was forbidden due to wartime restrictions, but Meyer was able to offer her a kilogram of uranium residue, pitchblende from which the uranium had been removed, which was actually better for her purpose. The indicator tests showed that the alpha activity was not due to these substances. All that now remained was to find evidence of actinium. For this more pitchblende was required, and this time Meyer was unable to assist, as the export was now prohibited. Meitner managed to obtain 100 g of "double residue"—pitchblende without uranium or radium—from Friedrich Oskar Giesel and began tests with 43 grams of it, but its composition was different, and at first her tests did not work.
Lise Meitner | World War I and the discovery of protactinium
But the isotope they had found was a beta emitter, and therefore could not be the mother isotope of actinium. This had to be another isotope of the same element. In 1914 Hahn and Meitner had developed a new technique for separating the tantalum group from pitchblende, which they hoped would speed the isolation of the new isotope. But when Meitner resumed work in 1917, not only Hahn but most of the students, laboratory assistants and technicians had been called up, so Meitner had to do everything herself. In February, Meitner extracted 2 grams of silicon dioxide () from 21 grams of pitchblende.
Lise Meitner | World War I and the discovery of protactinium
Meitner returned to the KWI for Chemistry and her research in October. In January 1917, she was appointed the head of her own physics section. The Hahn-Meitner Laboratory was divided into separate Hahn and Meitner Laboratories, and her pay was increased to 4,000 marks. Hahn returned to Berlin on leave, and they discussed another loose end from their pre-war work: the search for the mother isotope of actinium. According to the radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy, this had to be an isotope of the undiscovered element 91 on the periodic table that lay between thorium and uranium. Kasimir Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring discovered this element in 1913, and named it "brevium" after its short half life.
Lise Meitner | World War I and the discovery of protactinium
In July 1914—shortly before the outbreak of World War I in August—Hahn was called to active duty with the army in a "Landwehr" regiment. Meitner undertook X-ray technician training, and a course on anatomy at the city hospital in Lichterfelde. Meanwhile, she completed both the work on the beta ray spectrum that she had begun before the war with Hahn and Baeyer, and her own study of the uranium decay chain. In July 1915, she returned to Vienna, where she joined the Austrian Army as an X-ray nurse-technician. Her unit was soon deployed to the Eastern front in Poland, and she also served on the Italian front for a while before being discharged in September 1916.
Lise Meitner | World War I and the discovery of protactinium
She set 1.5 grams aside and added a tantalum pentafluoride () carrier to the other 0.5 grams, which she dissolved in hydrogen fluoride (). She then boiled it in concentrated sulfuric acid (), precipitated what was believed to be element 91, and verified that it was an alpha emitter. Hahn came home on leave in April, and together they devised a series of indicator tests to eliminate other known alpha emitters. The only known ones with similar chemical behaviour were lead-210 (which decays to alpha emitter polonium-210) and thorium-230. For this more pitchblende was required. Meitner went to Vienna, where she met with Stefan Meyer.
Lise Meitner | World War I and the discovery of protactinium
Based on the radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy, this was an isotope of the missing element, which they named "brevium" after its short half life. However, it was a beta emitter, and therefore could not be the mother isotope of actinium. This had to be another isotope of the same element. Hahn and Meitner set out to find the missing mother isotope. They developed a new technique for separating the tantalum group from pitchblende, which they hoped would speed the isolation of the new isotope. The work was interrupted by the First World War. Meitner became an X-ray nurse, working in Austrian Army hospitals, but she returned to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in October 1916.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of protactinium
She developed leukemia later in life due to inhaling an exploded capsule from her lab. Lastly, Kean mentions the injustice done to Lise Meitner and her tremendous work with Otto Hahn. They both found element 91 known as brevium, but then it was changed to protactinium. Owing to the fact that Lise was a woman and the advent of World War II, she was not awarded then or later. Otto Hahn received a Nobel Prize and did not mention her.
The Disappearing Spoon | Chapter 12. Political elements
Meitner therefore had to do everything herself, aided only briefly by Hahn when he came home on leave. By December 1917 she was able to isolate the substance, and after further work was able to prove that it was indeed the missing isotope. She submitted her findings for publication in March 1918. Although Fajans and Göhring had been the first to discover the element, custom required that an element was represented by its longest-lived and most abundant isotope, and brevium did not seem appropriate. Fajans agreed to Meitner naming the element protactinium, and assigning it the chemical symbol Pa. In June 1918, Soddy and John Cranston announced that they had extracted a sample of the isotope, but unlike Meitner were unable to describe its characteristics.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Protactinium
The new laboratories offered new opportunities, as the old ones had become too contaminated with radioactive substances to investigate feebly radioactive substances. They developed a new technique for separating the tantalum group from pitchblende, which they hoped would speed the isolation of the new isotope. The work was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Hahn was called up into the German Army, and Meitner became a volunteer radiographer in Austrian Army hospitals. She returned to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in October 1916, when not only Hahn, but most of the students, laboratory assistants and technicians had been called up.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Protactinium
Lise Meitner (; ; 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who contributed to the discoveries of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on radioactivity, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and nephew-physicist Otto Robert Frisch discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". Completing her doctoral research in 1905, Meitner became the first woman from the University of Vienna and second in the world to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent most of her scientific career in Berlin, Germany, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany.
Lise Meitner | Introduction
Fajans agreed to Meitner naming the element protoactinmium, and assigning it the chemical symbol Pa. In June 1918, Soddy and John Cranston announced that they had extracted a sample of the isotope, but unlike Meitner were unable to describe its characteristics. They acknowledged Meitner's priority, and agreed to the name. The connection to uranium remained a mystery, as neither of the known isotopes of uranium decayed into protactinium. It remained unsolved until the mother isotope, uranium-235, was discovered in 1929.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of protactinium
In 1906, he returned to Germany, where he became an assistant to Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin. At McGill he had become accustomed to working closely with a physicist, so he teamed up with Lise Meitner, who had received her doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1906, and had then moved to Berlin to study physics under Max Planck at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. Meitner found Hahn, who was her own age, less intimidating than older, more distinguished colleagues. Hahn and Meitner moved to the recently established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in 1913, and by 1920 had become the heads of their own laboratories there, with their own students, research programs and equipment.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Protactinium
Not only Hahn but most of the students, laboratory assistants and technicians had been called up, so she had to do everything herself, aided only briefly by Hahn when he came home on leave. By December 1917 she was able to isolate the substance, and after further work was able to prove that it was indeed the missing isotope. She submitted their findings for publication in March 1918. Although Fajans and Göhring had been the first to discover the element, custom required that an element was represented by its longest-lived and most abundant isotope, and brevium did not seem appropriate.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of protactinium
In Sweden, Meitner continued her research as best she could. She measured the neutron cross sections of thorium, lead and uranium using dysprosium as a neutron detector, an assay technique pioneered by George de Hevesy and Hilde Levi. She was able to arrange for Hedwig Kohn, who faced deportation Poland, to come Sweden, and eventually to emigrate to the United States, travelling via the Soviet Union. She was unsuccessful in bringing Stefen Meyer out, but he managed to survive the war. She declined an offer to join Frisch on the British mission to the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" She later said that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had come as a surprise to her, and that she was "sorry that the bomb had to be invented".
Lise Meitner | Later life
Initially, Hahn was not interested, but von Grosse's mention of protactinium changed his mind. "The only question", Hahn later wrote, "seemed to be whether Fermi had found isotopes of transuranian elements, or isotopes of the next-lower element, protactinium. At that time Lise Meitner and I decided to repeat Fermi's experiments in order to find out whether the 13-minute isotope was a protactinium isotope or not. It was a logical decision, having been the discoverers of protactinium." Hahn and Meitner were joined by Fritz Strassmann. Strassmann had received his doctorate in analytical chemistry from the Technical University of Hannover in 1929, and had come to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry to study under Hahn, believing that this would improve his employment prospects.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Objections
John A. Cranston, who had also come from Glasgow to Aberdeen with Soddy as a research assistant, was drafted in March 1915. Hitchins continued Cranston's research before she herself was drafted for war work in 1916. This research resulted in the successful identification of a new element in the decay chain between uranium-235 and actinium, later named protactinium. The discovery of protactinium completed the early version of the periodic table proposed by Dmitri Mendeleev, who predicted the existence of an element between thorium and uranium in 1871. The same isotope, Pa, was independently discovered around the same time by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner.
Ada Hitchins | Actinium and protactinium
She lost these positions in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and in 1938 she fled to Sweden, where she lived for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen. In mid-1938, Meitner with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute found that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes. Hahn and Strassmann later in the year showed that isotopes of barium could be formed by bombardment of uranium. In late December, Meitner and Frisch worked out the phenomenon of such splitting process. In their report in February issue of "Nature" in 1939, they gave the name "fission".
Lise Meitner | Introduction
Hahn, initially, was not, but he changed his mind when Aristid von Grosse suggested that what Fermi had found was an isotope of protactinium. "The only question", Hahn later wrote, "seemed to be whether Fermi had found isotopes of transuranium elements, or isotopes of the next-lower element, protactinium. At that time Lise Meitner and I decided to repeat Fermi's experiments in order to find out whether the 13-minute isotope was a protactinium isotope or not. It was a logical decision, having been the discoverers of protactinium." Between 1934 and 1938, Hahn, Meitner, and Strassmann found a great number of radioactive transmutation products, all of which they regarded as transuranic.
Lise Meitner | Transmutation
Soddy and Cranston published their paper in 1918. Although Hitchins was not included as a co-author, Soddy gave Hitchins significant credit for the contributions she had made to the research: The experiments were undertaken when the course of the disintegration of uranium and its connection with radium was quite obscure, but the experiments afford valuable data, which has never been properly discussed in the light of recent discoveries, on the possible modes of origin of actinium. With regard to the new work, in the absence of one of us on military service since 1915, the experiments were continued for a time by Miss Ada Hitchens, [sic] B.Sc, Carnegie Research Scholar, until she also left to engage in war duties.
Ada Hitchins | Actinium and protactinium
They acknowledged Meitner's priority, and agreed to the name. The connection to uranium remained a mystery, as neither of the known isotopes of uranium decayed into protactinium. It remained unsolved until uranium-235 was discovered in 1929.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Protactinium
Protactinium was first identified in 1913 by Kasimir Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring and named "brevium" because of the short half-life of the specific isotope studied, i.e. protactinium-234. A more stable isotope of protactinium, Pa, was discovered in 1917/18 by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, and they chose the name proto-actinium, but the IUPAC finally named it "protactinium" in 1949 and confirmed Hahn and Meitner as discoverers. The new name meant "(nuclear) precursor of actinium" and reflected that actinium is a product of radioactive decay of protactinium. John Arnold Cranston (working with Frederick Soddy and Ada Hitchins) is also credited with discovering the most stable isotope in 1915, but delayed his announcement due to being called up for service in the First World War.
Protactinium | Introduction
Protactinium was first identified in 1913 by Kasimir Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring at the University of Karlsruhe. The new element was called brevium due to the short half-life of the isotope specific studied, Protactinium-234 (234 Pa). Fajans and Göhring also worked to identify as many isotopes of the new element as possible, and also to publicize their discovery—a process that was hampered by the onset of World War I. In 1914, Göhring was conscripted into the army. Presumably he perished during the war; he is listed as the author of no further scientific articles or publications after 1915.
Oswald Helmuth Göhring | Discovery of protactinium
This principle led to the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II, and the subsequently other nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
Lise Meitner | Introduction
Rubens said that he would be happy for her to work in his laboratory. He also added that Otto Hahn at the chemistry institute was looking for a physicist to collaborate with. A few minutes later she was introduced to Hahn. He had studied radioactive substances under Sir William Ramsay, and in Montreal under Rutherford, and was already credited with the discovery of what were then thought to be several new radioactive elements. (In fact, they were isotopes of known elements, but the concept of an isotope, along with the term, was only propounded by Frederick Soddy in 1913.) Hahn was the same age as herself, and she noted his informal and approachable manner.
Lise Meitner | Friedrich Wilhelm University
Articles published in the 1970s and later suggest that Debierne's results published in 1904 conflict with those reported in 1899 and 1900. Furthermore, the now-known chemistry of actinium precludes its presence as anything other than a minor constituent of Debierne's 1899 and 1900 results; in fact, the chemical properties he reported make it likely that he had, instead, accidentally identified protactinium, which would not be discovered for another fourteen years, only to have it disappear due to its hydrolysis and adsorption onto his laboratory equipment. This has led some authors to advocate that Giesel alone should be credited with the discovery.
Actinium | History
Hahn, initially, was not, but he changed his mind when Aristid von Grosse suggested that what Fermi had found was an isotope of protactinium. "The only question", Hahn later wrote, "seemed to be whether Fermi had found isotopes of transuranian elements, or isotopes of the next-lower element, protactinium. At that time Lise Meitner and I decided to repeat Fermi's experiments in order to find out whether the 13-minute isotope was a protactinium isotope or not. It was a logical decision, having been the discoverers of protactinium." Between 1934 and 1938, Hahn, Meitner and Strassmann found a great number of radioactive transmutation products, all of which they regarded as transuranic.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of nuclear fission
Anxious to finish up before the Christmas break, Hahn and Strassmann submitted their findings to "Naturwissenschaften" on 22 December without waiting for Meitner to reply. Hahn concluded the paper with: "As chemists... we should substitute the symbols Ba, La, Ce for Ra, Ac, Th. As 'nuclear chemists' fairly close to physics we cannot yet bring ourselves to take this step which contradicts all previous experience in physics." Frisch normally celebrated Christmas with Meitner in Berlin, but in 1938 she accepted an invitation from Eva von Bahr to spend it with her family at Kungälv, and Meitner asked Frisch to join her there.
Lise Meitner | Nuclear fission
In 1917/18, two groups of scientists, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner of Germany and Frederick Soddy and John Cranston of Great Britain, independently discovered another isotope of protactinium, Pa, having a much longer half-life of about 32,000 years. Thus the name "brevium" was changed to "protoactinium" as the new element was part of the decay chain of uranium-235 as the parent of actinium (from "prôtos" "first, before"). For ease of pronunciation, the name was shortened to "protactinium" by IUPAC in 1949. The discovery of protactinium completed one of the last gaps in the early versions of the periodic table, proposed by Mendeleev in 1869, and it brought to fame the involved scientists.
Protactinium | History
In 1913, chemists Frederick Soddy and Kasimir Fajans independently observed that alpha decay caused atoms to shift down two places on the periodic table, while the loss of two beta particles restored it to its original position. Under the resulting reorganisation of the periodic table, radium was placed in group II, actinium in group III, thorium in group IV and uranium in group VI. This left a gap between thorium and uranium. Soddy predicted that this unknown element, which he referred to (after Dmitri Mendeleev) as "ekatantalium", would be an alpha emitter with chemical properties similar to tantalium. It was not long before Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring discovered it as a decay product of a beta-emitting product of thorium.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of protactinium
Despite the many honours that Meitner received in her lifetime, she did not receive the Nobel Prize while it was awarded to Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission. On 15 November 1945, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei". Meitner was the one who told Hahn and Strassman to test their radium in more detail and it was she who told Hahn that it was possible for the nucleus of uranium to disintegrate. Without these contributions of Meitner, Hahn would not have found that the uranium nucleus can split in half.
Lise Meitner | Nobel Prize for nuclear fission
Her nominators included Arthur Compton, Dirk Coster, Kasimir Fajans, James Franck, Otto Hahn, Oscar Klein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck and Max Born. Despite not having been awarded the Nobel Prize, Meitner was invited to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962. Max Perutz, the 1962 Nobel prizewinner in chemistry, reached a similar conclusion: "Having been locked up in the Nobel Committee's files these fifty years, the documents leading to this unjust award now reveal that the protracted deliberations by the Nobel jury were hampered by lack of appreciation both of the joint work that had preceded the discovery and of Meitner's written and verbal contributions after her flight from Berlin."
Lise Meitner | Nobel Prize for nuclear fission
Over Christmas 1938, Meitner considered the problem of the uranium nucleus, which she reasoned, given its relative size, must be quite unstable. She decided to model the nucleus as a drop of water, ready to divide with the impact of a single neutron. She realised the nucleus had split in half, and both Fermi and Hahn had witnessed what is now known as nuclear fission. However, in doing the calculations for such an event, Meitner was unable to make the equations balance. She calculated that the products of the fission reaction were lighter than the initial uranium, by about one fifth of a proton.
Chemistry: A Volatile History | Lise Meitner explains Fermi's work
As head of the physics section at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin she collaborated closely with the head of chemistry Otto Hahn on atomic physics until forced to flee Berlin in 1938. In 1939, in collaboration with her nephew Otto Frisch, Meitner derived the theoretical explanation for an experiment performed by Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin, thereby demonstrating the occurrence of nuclear fission. The possibility that Fermi's bombardment of uranium with neutrons in 1934 had instead produced fission by breaking up the nucleus into lighter elements, had actually first been raised in print in 1934, by chemist Ida Noddack (co-discover of the element rhenium), but this suggestion had been ignored at the time, as no group made a concerted effort to find any of these light radioactive fission products.
Women in science | Europe before World War II
These included Arnold Flammersfeld, Kan-Chang Wang and Nikolaus Riehl. In 1926, she became an "außerordentlicher Professor" (extraordinary professor), the first woman university physics professor in Germany. Her physics section became larger, and she acquired a permanent assistant. Scientists from Germany and around the world came to the KWI for Chemistry to conduct research under her supervision. In 1930, Meitner taught a seminar on "Questions of Atomic Physics and Atomic Chemistry" with Leó Szilárd. Meitner had a Wilson cloud chamber constructed at the KWI for Chemistry, the first one in Berlin, and with her student Kurt Freitag studied the tracks of alpha particles that did not collide with a nucleus.
Lise Meitner | Beta radiation
Irène then went on to work as her mother's assistant, teaching radiology at the Radium Institute, which had been built by her parents. Her doctoral thesis was concerned with the alpha decay of polonium, the element discovered by her parents (along with radium) and named after Marie's country of birth, Poland. Irène became a Doctor of Science in 1925.
Irène Joliot-Curie | World War I
She considered the possibility that the reactions were from different isotopes of uranium; three were known: uranium-238, uranium-235 and uranium-234. However, when she calculated the neutron cross section it was too large to be anything other than the most abundant isotope, uranium-238. She concluded that it must be a case of nuclear isomerism, which had been discovered in protactinium by Hahn in 1922. Nuclear isomerism had been given a physical explanation by von Weizsäcker, who had been Meitner's assistant in 1936, but had since taken a position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Different nuclear isomers of protactinium had different half-lives, and this could be the case for uranium too, but if so it was somehow being inherited by the daughter and granddaughter products, which seemed to be stretching the argument to breaking point.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Research
It was not long before Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring discovered it as a decay product of a beta-emitting product of thorium. Based on the radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy, this was an isotope of the missing element, which they named "brevium" after its short half-life. However, it was a beta emitter, and therefore could not be the mother isotope of actinium. This had to be another isotope. Two scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) in Berlin-Dahlem took up the challenge of finding the missing isotope. Otto Hahn had graduated from the University of Marburg as an organic chemist, but had been a post-doctoral researcher at University College London under Sir William Ramsay, and under Rutherford at McGill University, where he had studied radioactive isotopes.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Protactinium
Meitner's diploma bore the words: "For pioneering research in the naturally occurring radioactivities and extensive experimental studies leading to the discovery of fission". Hahn's diploma was slightly different: "For pioneering research in the naturally occurring radioactivities and extensive experimental studies culminating in the discovery of fission." Hahn and Strassmann were present, but Meitner was too ill to attend, so Frisch accepted the award on her behalf.
Discovery of nuclear fission | In history and memory
The German chemist Ida Noddack notably suggested in print in 1934 that instead of creating a new, heavier element 93, that "it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments." However, Noddack's conclusion was not pursued at the time. After the Fermi publication, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann began performing similar experiments in Berlin. Meitner, an Austrian Jew, lost her Austrian citizenship with the "Anschluss", the union of Austria with Germany in March 1938, but she fled in July 1938 to Sweden and started a correspondence by mail with Hahn in Berlin. By coincidence, her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, also a refugee, was also in Sweden when Meitner received a letter from Hahn dated 19 December describing his chemical proof that some of the product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons was barium.
Nuclear fission | Discovery of nuclear fission
As such, she marked his students' papers. It was her first paid position. Assistant was the lowest rung on the academic ladder, and Meitner was the first female scientific assistant in Prussia. Proud officials presented Meitner to Kaiser Wilhelm II at the official opening of the KWI for Chemistry on 23 October 1912. The following year she became a "Mitglied" (associate), the same rank as Hahn (although her salary was still less), and the radioactivity section became the Hahn-Meitner Laboratory. Meitner celebrated with a dinner party at the Hotel Adlon. Hahn and Meitner's salaries would soon be dwarfed by royalties from mesothorium (radium-228 – "German radium") produced for medical purposes, for which Hahn received 66,000 marks in 1914, of which he gave ten per cent to Meitner.
Lise Meitner | Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry
They identified ten different half lives, with varying degrees of certainty. To account for them, Meitner had to hypothesise a new class of reaction and the alpha decay of uranium, neither of which had ever been reported before, and for which physical evidence was lacking. Hahn and Strassmann refined their chemical procedures, while Meitner devised new experiments to shine more light on the reaction processes.
Lise Meitner | Transmutation
As president of the Max Planck Society from 1946 to 1960, he projected an image of German science as undiminished in brilliance and untainted by Nazism to an audience that wanted to believe it. In contrast, in the immediate aftermath of the war Meitner and Frisch were hailed as the discoverers of fission in English-speaking countries. Japan was seen as a puppet state of Germany and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as poetic justice for the persecution of the Jewish people. In January 1946, Meitner toured the United States, where she gave lectures and received honorary degrees. She attended a cocktail party for Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project (who gave her sole credit for the discovery of fission in his 1962 memoirs), and was named Woman of the Year by the Women's National Press Club.
Discovery of nuclear fission | In history and memory
The war years were times of privation for Spielrein: she did some work as a surgeon and in an eye clinic, but also received contributions from her parents when they could get these to her. She did however manage to publish two more short papers during the war years. She composed music, and considered becoming a composer. She also began to write a novel in French. She recorded observations of her daughter's development in terms of language and play. She continued her correspondence with Freud and Jung and her development of her own theoretical ideas, particularly in relation to attachment in children.
Sabina Spielrein | Career 1912–1920 including "Destruction" paper
After graduating from University College London, Lieber became a doctoral student at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in 1936. She studied barium and strontium extensively, discovered several isotopes of both elements, and used radiochemistry to investigate barium and strontium dehydration reactions. She also discovered that uranium could decay into strontium and xenon. With Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, she conducted research that led to the discovery of fission and fission products. In 1939, she returned to the United States without a Ph.D. She became married after the war and served on the Committee for the Resettlement of Japanese-Americans. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Clara Lieber | Career and research
Alice Guionnet also demonstrated significant results in free probabilities by comparing Voiculescu entropies, building with Vaughan Jones and Dimitri Shlyakhtenko a round of subfactors from planar algebras of any index, and establishing isomorphisms between the algebras of von Neumann generated by q-Gaussian variables by constructing free transport.
Alice Guionnet | Works
He returned to Germany in 1906, and Emil Fischer placed a former woodworking shop in the basement of the Chemical Institute at the University of Berlin at his disposal to use as a laboratory. Hahn completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907, and became a "Privatdozent". In 1912, he became head of the Radioactivity Department of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Working with the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner in the building that now bears their names, he made a series of groundbreaking discoveries, culminating with her isolation of the longest-lived isotope of protactinium in 1918. During World War I he served with a "Landwehr" regiment on the Western Front, and with the chemical warfare unit headed by Fritz Haber on the Western, Eastern and Italian fronts, earning the Iron Cross (2nd Class) for his part in the First Battle of Ypres.
Otto Hahn | Introduction
Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium, presented it to her in the home of Max Perutz in Cambridge on 23 October 1966. After her death in 1968, Meitner received many naming honours. In 1997, the element 109 was named meitnerium. She is the first and so far the only non-mythological woman thus exclusively honoured (since Curium was named after both Marie and Pierre Curie). Additional naming honours are the Hahn–Meitner-Institut in Berlin, craters on the Moon, and Venus, and the main-belt asteroid 6999 Meitner. In 2000, the European Physical Society established the biannual "Lise Meitner Prize" for excellent research in nuclear science.
Lise Meitner | Awards and honours
Meitner's earliest research began at age eight, when she kept a notebook of her records underneath her pillow. She was particularly drawn to mathematics and science, and first studied colours of an oil slick, thin films, and reflected light. Women were not allowed to attend public institutions of higher education in Vienna until 1897, and she completed her final year of school in 1892. Her education included bookkeeping, arithmetic, history, geography, science, French and gymnastics. The only career available to women was teaching, so she trained as a French teacher. Her sister Gisela passed the "Matura", and entered medical school in 1900.
Lise Meitner | Education
Women were granted the right of habilitation in Prussia in 1920, and in 1922 Meitner was granted her habilitation and became a "Privatdozentin". She was the first woman to receive her habilitation in physics in Prussia, and only the second in Germany after Hedwig Kohn. Since Meitner had already published over 40 papers, she was not required to submit a thesis, but Max von Laue recommended that the requirement for an inaugural lecture not be waived, since he was interested in what she had to say. She therefore gave an inaugural lecture on "Problems of Cosmic Physics". From 1923 to 1933, she taught a colloquium or tutorial at Friedrich Wilhelm University each semester, and supervised doctoral students at the KWI for Chemistry.
Lise Meitner | Beta radiation
The same attitude carried over to Noddack, who did not propose an alternative nuclear model, nor conduct experiments to support her claim. Although Noddack was a renowned analytical chemist, she lacked the background in physics to appreciate the enormity of what she was proposing. Noddack was not the only critic of Fermi's claim. Aristid von Grosse suggested that what Fermi had found was an isotope of protactinium. Meitner was eager to investigate Fermi's results, but she recognised that a highly skilled chemist was required, and she wanted the best one she knew: Hahn, although they had not collaborated for many years.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Objections
Strongly radioactive substances were stored in the old wood shop, and later in a purpose-built radium house on the institute grounds.
Lise Meitner | Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry
With the discovery of protactinium, most of the decay chains of uranium had been mapped. When Hahn returned to his work after the war, he looked back over his 1914 results, and considered some anomalies that had been dismissed or overlooked. He dissolved uranium salts in a hydrofluoric acid solution with tantalic acid. First the tantalum in the ore was precipitated, then the protactinium. In addition to the uranium X1 (thorium-234) and uranium X2 (protactinium-234), Hahn detected traces of a radioactive substance with a half life of between 6 and 7 hours. There was one isotope known to have a half life of 6.2 hours, mesothorium II (actinium-228).
Otto Hahn | Discovery of nuclear isomerism
In 1914, Meitner received an attractive offer of an academic position in Prague. Planck made it clear to Fischer that he didn't want Meitner to leave, and Fischer arranged for her salary to be doubled to 3,000 marks. The move to new accommodation was fortuitous, as the wood shop had become thoroughly contaminated by radioactive liquids that had been spilt, and radioactive gases that had vented and the decayed and settled as radioactive dust, making sensitive measurements impossible. To ensure that their clean new laboratories stayed that way, Hahn and Meitner instituted strict procedures. Chemical and physical measurements were conducted in different rooms, people handling radioactive substances had to follow protocols that included not shaking hands, and rolls of toilet paper were hung next to every telephone and door handle.
Lise Meitner | Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry
Bohr's liquid drop model had not yet been formulated, so there was no theoretical way to calculate whether it was physically possible for the uranium atoms to break into large pieces. Noddack and her husband, Walter Noddack, were renowned chemists who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of rhenium, although at the time they were also embroiled in a controversy over the discovery of element 43, which they called "masurium". The discovery of technetium by Emilio Segrè and Carlo Perrier put an end to their claim, but did not occur until 1937. It is unlikely that Meitner or Curie had any prejudice against Noddack because of her sex, but Meitner was not afraid to tell Hahn "Hahnchen, von Physik verstehst Du Nichts" ("Hahn dear, of physics you understand nothing").
Discovery of nuclear fission | Objections
On 19 December, Hahn wrote to Meitner, informing her that the radium isotopes behaved chemically like barium. Anxious to finish up before the Christmas break, Hahn and Strassmann submitted their findings to "Naturwissenschaften" on 22 December without waiting for Meitner to reply. Hahn concluded with: "As chemists... we should substitute the symbols Ba, La, Ce for Ra, Ac, Th. As 'nuclear chemists' fairly close to physics we cannot yet bring ourselves to take this step which contradicts all previous experience in physics." Frisch normally celebrated Christmas with Meitner in Berlin, but in 1938 she accepted an invitation from Eva von Bahr to spend it with her family at Kungälv, and Meitner asked Frisch to join her there.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Eureka!
This was not in any probable decay chain, but it could have been contamination, as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry had experimented with it. Hahn and Meitner demonstrated in 1919 that when actinium is treated with hydrofluoric acid, it remains in the insoluble residue. Since mesothorium II was an isotope of actinium, the substance was not mesothorium II; it was protactinium. Hahn was now confident enough that he had found something that he named his new isotope "uranium Z", and in February 1921, he published the first report on his discovery. Hahn determined that uranium Z had a half life of around 6.7 hours (with a two per cent margin of error) and that when uranium X1 decayed, it became uranium X2 about 99.75 per cent of the time, and uranium Z around 0.25 per cent of the time.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of nuclear isomerism
But I believe that Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission—how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn." Hahn's receipt of a Nobel Prize was long expected. Both he and Meitner had been nominated for both the chemistry and the physics prizes several times even before the discovery of nuclear fission. According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 29 times for Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1965.
Lise Meitner | Nobel Prize for nuclear fission
Soddy and Kasimir Fajans independently observed in 1913 that alpha decay caused atoms to shift down two places in the periodic table, while the loss of two beta particles restored it to its original position. In the resulting reorganisation of the periodic table, radium was placed in group II, actinium in group III, thorium in group IV and uranium in group VI. This left a gap between thorium and uranium. Soddy predicted that this unknown element, which he referred to (after Dmitri Mendeleev) as "ekatantalium", would be an alpha emitter with chemical properties similar to tantalium (now known as tantalum).
Discovery of nuclear fission | Protactinium
Oswald Helmuth Göhring, also known as Otto Göhring, (1889 - 1915) was a German chemist who, with his teacher Kasimir Fajans, co-discovered the chemical element protactinium in 1913.
Oswald Helmuth Göhring | Introduction
During the Christmas holiday in 1938, Frisch visited his aunt Lise Meitner in Kungälv in Sweden, where she had relocated after Germany's annexation of Austria. While there she received the news that her former colleagues Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin had discovered that the collision of a neutron with a uranium nucleus produced barium as one of its byproducts. Frisch and Meitner hypothesized that the uranium nucleus had split in two. They estimated the energy released at around 200 MeV, and Frisch appropriated the term fission from biology to describe it. Hahn's paper described the experiment and the finding of the barium byproduct.
Frisch–Peierls memorandum | Nuclear fission
If she wanted to go to the toilet, she had to use one at the restaurant down the street. The following year, women were admitted to Prussian universities, and Fischer lifted the restrictions, and had women's toilets installed in the building. Not all the chemists were happy about this. The Institute of Physics was more accepting, and she became friends with the physicists there, including , James Franck, Gustav Hertz, Robert Pohl, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Westphal.
Lise Meitner | Friedrich Wilhelm University
Hahn and Strassmann isolated the three radium isotopes (verified by their half-lives) and used fractional crystallisation to separate it from its barium carrier by adding barium bromide crystals in four steps. Since radium precipitates preferentially in a solution of barium bromide, at each step the fraction drawn off would contain less radium than the one before. However, they found no difference between each of the fractions. In case their process was faulty in some way, they verified it with known isotopes of radium; the process was fine. On 19 December, Hahn wrote to Meitner, informing her that the radium isotopes behaved chemically like barium.
Lise Meitner | Nuclear fission
Clara Flora Lieber (July 10, 1902 – December 14, 1982) was an American chemist known for her work with Otto Hahn on discovering fission, and her discovery of several isotopes of strontium and barium.
Clara Lieber | Introduction
Enrico Fermi and his colleagues in Rome picked up on this idea, and began irradiating elements with neutrons. The radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy said that beta decay causes isotopes to move one element up on the periodic table, and alpha decay causes them to move two down. When Fermi's group bombarded uranium atoms were with neutrons, they found a complex mix of half lives. Fermi therefore concluded that the new elements with atomic numbers greater than 92 (known as transuranium elements) had been created. Meitner and Hahn had not collaborated for many years, but Meitner was eager to investigate Fermi's results.
Lise Meitner | Transmutation
After the war Meitner acknowledged her own moral failing in staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938. She wrote: "It was not only stupid but very wrong that I did not leave at once." She not only regretted her inaction during this period, she was also bitterly critical of Hahn, Max von Laue, Werner Heisenberg, and other German scientists. In a June 1945 letter addressed to Hahn, but that he never received, she wrote: In the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, Meitner found that she had become a celebrity. She had a radio interview with Eleanor Roosevelt, and a few days later another one with a radio station in New York, during which heard her sister Frida's voice for the first time in years.
Lise Meitner | Later life
Among other results, it provided a proof of the compactness theorem using ultraproducts. With Chen Chung Chang, she also used reduced products to show that a sufficient condition for properties to be preserved under direct products, derived by Alfred Horn, was not also a necessary condition.
Anne C. Morel | Research contributions
Meitner received the letter from Hahn describing his chemical proof that some of the product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons was barium. Barium had an atomic mass 40% less than uranium, and no previously known methods of radioactive decay could account for such a large difference in the mass of the nucleus. Nonetheless, she had immediately written back to Hahn to say: "At the moment the assumption of such a thoroughgoing breakup seems very difficult to me, but in nuclear physics we have experienced so many surprises, that one cannot unconditionally say: 'It is impossible.'" Meitner felt that Hahn was too careful a chemist to make an elementary blunder, but found the results difficult to explain.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Eureka!
Hahn and Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin bombarded uranium with slow neutrons, and discovered that barium had been produced. They reported their findings by mail to Meitner in Sweden, who a few months earlier had fled Nazi Germany. Meitner and her nephew Frisch theorised, and then proved, that the uranium nucleus had been split, and published their findings in "Nature". Meitner calculated that the energy released by each disintegration was approximately 200 megaelectronvolts, and Frisch observed this. By analogy with the division of biological cells, he named the process "fission". Hahn was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Introduction
The first two reactions that the Berlin group had observed were light elements created by the breakup of uranium nuclei; the third, the 23-minute one, was a decay into the real element 93. On returning to Copenhagen, Frisch informed Bohr, who slapped his forehead and exclaimed "What idiots we have been!" Bohr promised not to say anything until they had a paper ready for publication. To speed the process, they decided to submit a one-page note to "Nature". At this point, the only evidence that they had was the barium. Logically, if barium was formed, the other element must be krypton, although Hahn mistakenly believed that the atomic masses had to add up to 239 rather than the atomic numbers adding up to 92, and thought it was masurium (technetium), and so did not check for it: Over a series of long-distance phone calls, Meitner and Frisch came up with a simple experiment to bolster their claim: to measure the recoil of the fission fragments, using a Geiger counter with the threshold set above that of the alpha particles.
Lise Meitner | Nuclear fission
Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. Flügge and Gottfried von Droste, an assistant to Meitner, independently also predicted a large energy release from nuclear fission.
Siegfried Flügge | Career
Before she could begin her work in May, the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" ("Law on the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service") came into force, which prohibited opportunity for advancement to her in Germany. After being thus barred from all opportunities for scientific activity in Germany, she received a scholarship from the American Association of University Women for the year 1934/35, the A.A.U.W. International Fellowship. With it, she moved to Italy, and also traveled to Greece and the United States. During this time, she continued her studies in ancient terracotta. At the end of the scholarship, she continued her studies with support from Hetty Goldman.
Elisabeth Jastrow | Career
She considered the possibility that the reactions were from different isotopes of uranium; three were known: uranium-238, uranium-235 and uranium-234. However, when she calculated the neutron cross section, it was too large to be anything other than the most abundant isotope, uranium-238. She concluded that it must be another case of the nuclear isomerism that Hahn had discovered in protactinium. She therefore ended her report on a very different note to Hahn, reporting that: "The process must be neutron capture by uranium-238, which leads to three isomeric nuclei of uranium-239. This result is very difficult to reconcile with current concepts of the nucleus."
Otto Hahn | Discovery of nuclear fission
Meitner received the letter from Hahn describing his chemical proof that some of the product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons was barium. Barium had an atomic mass 40% less than uranium, and no previously known methods of radioactive decay could account for such a large difference in the mass of the nucleus. Nonetheless, she had immediately written back to Hahn to say: "At the moment the assumption of such a thoroughgoing breakup seems very difficult to me, but in nuclear physics we have experienced so many surprises, that one cannot unconditionally say: 'It is impossible.'" According to Frisch: Meitner and Frisch had correctly interpreted Hahn's results to mean that the nucleus of uranium had split roughly in half.
Lise Meitner | Nuclear fission
Fackenheim's affirmation of his Jewish heritage, although embraced by many other Holocaust survivors, was by no means universal. Physicist Lise Meitner had been born and brought up Jewish. She rejected newspaper attempts to characterize her as a Jew following the bombing of Hiroshima when the press learned that she had been the first scientist to recognize nuclear fission. Decades before Hitler rose to power she had become a Lutheran. Although the Nazis stole her savings and ruined her career she refused to work on the bomb or let Hitler define her identity.
Emil Fackenheim | Conversion to other religions
In 1947 she celebrated the collapse of the "horror regiment" (""Schreckensregiment"") with two small written contributions, intended to demonstrate "the great importance of a system of law that matches up to the real simple realities of human rights".
Mathilde Planck | Nazi years
At the reception for this award, she sat next to the President of the United States, Harry S. Truman. But Meitner did not enjoy public speaking, especially in English, nor did she relish the role of a celebrity, and she declined the offer of a visiting professorship at Wellesley College. In 1966, the United States Atomic Energy Commission jointly awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize to Hahn, Strassmann and Meitner for their discovery of fission. The ceremony was held in the Hofburg palace in Vienna. It was the first time that the Enrico Fermi Prize had been awarded to non-Americans, and the first time it was presented to a woman.
Discovery of nuclear fission | In history and memory
Edith Kroupa (1910–1991) was a research chemist who utilized microchemical analysis in the laboratory of Professor A. Franke at the University of Vienna. In 1930, Kroupa and Friedrich Hecht analyzed a sample of radioactive rock from the Huron Claim, Manitoba near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The team determined the sample to be over 1,725,000,000 years old. Also in 1930, Kroupa and her colleague Friedrich Hecht had discovered triple-weight hydrogen, also known as tritium.
Edith Kroupa | Introduction
The President of Germany, Theodor Heuss, awarded her the highest German order for scientists, the peace class of the Pour le Mérite in 1957, the same year as Hahn. Meitner became a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1945, and a full member in 1951, permitting her to participate in the Nobel Prize process. Four years later she was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. She was also elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960. She received honorary doctorates from Adelphi College, the University of Rochester, Rutgers University and Smith College in the United States, and from the University of Stockholm in Sweden.
Lise Meitner | Awards and honours
Like Meitner, Hahn was unpaid, and lived off an allowance from his father, although somewhat larger than hers. He completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907, and became a "Privatdozent". Most of the organic chemists at the chemistry institute did not regarded Hahn's work—detecting minute traces of isotopes too small to see, weigh or smell through their radioactivity—as real chemistry. One department head remarked that "it is incredible what one gets to be a "Privatdozent" these days!" The arrangement was difficult for Meitner at first. Women were not yet admitted to universities in Prussia. Meitner was allowed to work in the wood shop, which had its own external entrance, but could not set foot in the rest of the institute, including Hahn's laboratory space upstairs.
Lise Meitner | Friedrich Wilhelm University
One department head remarked: "it is incredible what one gets to be a "Privatdozent" these days!" Physicists were more accepting of Hahn's work, and he began attending a colloquium at the Physics Institute conducted by Heinrich Rubens. It was at one of these colloquia where, on 28 September 1907, he made the acquaintance of the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner. Almost the same age as himself, she was only the second woman to receive a doctorate from the University of Vienna, and had already published two papers on radioactivity. Rubens suggested her as a possible collaborator. So began the thirty-year collaboration and lifelong close friendship between the two scientists.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of mesothorium I
This refinement resulted in greater cyclotron efficiency and thereafter became a regular feature in cyclotron design. Others assisting Anderson in the construction of the cyclotron were Eugene T. Booth, G. Norris Glasoe, Hugh Glassford, and, of course, professor Dunning. In anticipation of conducting experiments with the cyclotron, Anderson also built an ionization chamber and a linear amplifier in late 1938. In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to "Naturwissenschaften" reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission.
Herbert L. Anderson | Education
After graduating, among her other projects she collaborated with Adolf Loos, planning settlements for World War I invalids and veterans. During this time she also worked alongside architect Josef Frank and philosopher Otto Neurath in the context of the newly founded Austrian Association for Settlements and Small Gardens. Her memories of these and many other Austrian architects and intellectuals are collected in her book "Warum ich Architektin wurde" (Why I Became an Architect).
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky | Early life and education
She decided to investigate for herself, theorizing that actinium was decaying into another element (a daughter atom) and that the observed beta particles were actually coming from that daughter atom. She confirmed this by isolating extremely pure actinium and studying its radiation very quickly; she detected a small amount of alpha radiation, a type of radiation that involves the loss of protons and therefore changes an atom's identity. Loss of an alpha particle (consisting of 2 protons and 2 neutrons) would turn actinium (element 89, with 89 protons) into the theorized but never-before-seen element 87. Perey named the element francium, after her home country, and it joined the other alkali metals in Group 1 of the periodic table of elements.
Marguerite Perey | Research and career
In 1921, Meitner accepted an invitation from Manne Siegbahn to come to Sweden and give a series of lectures on radioactivity as a visiting professor at Lund University. She found that very little research had been done on radioactivity in Sweden, but she was eager to learn about X-ray spectroscopy, which was Siegbahn's specialty. At his laboratory, she met a Dutch doctoral candidate, Dirk Coster, who was studying X-ray spectroscopy, and his wife Miep, who was working on her doctorate in Indonesian language and culture. Armed with this knowledge, Meitner took a fresh look at the beta-ray spectra when she returned to Berlin.
Lise Meitner | Beta radiation
She eventually returned to Paris and resumed her doctoral thesis in mycology, specifically the mysterious origin of the binucleate stage in basidiomycete mycelia. Her findings were published in 1917 as a brief paper, “"Sexuality in the Basidiomycete Fungi"” and in the subsequent “"Research in the evolutionary cycle and sexuality of Basidiomycetes".”
Mathilde Bensaude | Biography
During the Christmas holiday in 1938 he visited his aunt Lise Meitner in Kungälv. While there she received the news that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin had discovered that the collision of a neutron with a uranium nucleus produced the element barium as one of its byproducts. Hahn, in a letter to Meitner, called this new reaction a "bursting" of the uranium nucleus. Frisch and Meitner hypothesized that the uranium nucleus had split in two, explained the process, and estimated the energy released, and Frisch coined the term fission to describe it. Political restraints of the Nazi era forced the team of Hahn and that of Frisch and Meitner (both of whom were Jewish) to publish separately.
Otto Robert Frisch | Nuclear fission
In an addendum, his "Habilitation" thesis contains a discussion of von Laue's discovery of X-ray diffraction. Following his "Habilitation", Pohl began giving lecture courses on experimental physics, which also motivated him to start acquiring a private collection of lecture-demonstration apparatus. He also performed demonstration experiments at the meetings of the Physical Society. By the outbreak of WW I, he had published 54 scientific articles and three books. When war broke out, Pohl attempted unsuccessfully to volunteer for military service, but was refused for health reasons. His suggestion, together with Erich Regener, to set up and operate privately-funded diagnostic X-ray apparatus in two military reserve hospitals was gratefully accepted.
Robert Wichard Pohl | Career up to World War I
In 1900, William Crookes isolated protactinium as an intensely radioactive material from uranium; however, he could not characterize it as a new chemical element and thus named it uranium-X (UX). Crookes dissolved uranium nitrate in ether, and the residual aqueous phase contains most of the and . His method was still used in the 1950s to isolate and from uranium compounds. Protactinium was first identified in 1913, when Kasimir Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring encountered the isotope Pa during their studies of the decay chains of uranium-238: → → → . They named the new element "brevium" (from the Latin word, "brevis", meaning brief or short) because of its short half-life, 6.7 hours for .
Protactinium | History
Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted Hahn's and Strassmann's results as being nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.
Werner Heisenberg | Membership in the Uranverein
This is the chief part of what we possess. I should like to bring it back here and invest it in war loans. The state needs it. Only, I have no illusions: this money will probably be lost. She was also an active member in committees of Polonia in France dedicated to the Polish cause. After the war, she summarized her wartime experiences in a book, "Radiology in War" (1919).
Marie Curie | World War I
As a result, he could neither work in the chemical industry nor receive his habilitation. Meitner persuaded Hahn to hire him as an assistant. Soon he would be credited as a third collaborator on the papers they produced, and would sometimes even be listed first. Between 1933 and 1935, Meitner published exclusively in "Naturwissenschaften", as its editor Arnold Berliner was Jewish, and continued to accept submissions from Jewish scientists. This generated a boycott of the publication, and in August 1935 publisher Springer-Verlag fired Berliner.
Lise Meitner | National socialism
Mussells Seyfert was employed as a human computer at the Harvard College Observatory. She is best known for discovery of new ring nebulae in the Milky Way.
Muriel Mussells Seyfert | Scientific contributions
Upon receipt of her doctorate, Pusch, in the summer semester of 1916, became the only female "Assistent" (assistant) at the "Physikalisch-Chemischen Institut" at the "Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität". She was hired in as a civil servant based upon Article 128 in the Weimar Constitution, which is listed as abolishing discriminatory regulations against women civil servants. During this time, Lotte worked with Walther Nernst in regards to the Photo-Induced Chain Reaction of Chlorine and Hydrogen. They looked to find the mechanism for why this reactions is able to produce a large quantum yield. She held the position until 1920. By law, as a civil servant, she was required to relinquish her position to a returning man, in this case Dr.
Lotte Pusch | Career
With her assistant Kurt Philipp she later used it to take the first images of positron traces from gamma radiation. She proved Chadwick's assertion that the spectral lines were entirely the result of secondary electrons, and the spectra were therefore indeed entirely caused by the primary ones. In 1927, Charles Drummond Ellis and William Alfred Wooster measured the energy of the continuous spectrum produced by the beta decay of bismuth-210 at 0.34 MeV where the energy of each disintegration was 0.35 MeV. Thus, the spectrum accounted for nearly all of the energy. Meitner was so stunned by this result that she repeated the experiment with Wilhelm Orthmann using an improved method, and verified Ellis and Wooster's results.
Lise Meitner | Beta radiation
Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, Discovery of fission}}correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. Droste and Siegfried Flügge, an assistant to Hahn, independently also predicted a large energy release from nuclear fission.
Gottfried von Droste | Career
Debierne's name was retained because it had seniority. Giesel stated in one of his publications that the sample Debierne provided for the comparison was a lanthanum fraction obtained by the same process he used and not the titanium or thorium fractions from earlier publications. This fact never led to an open controversy but the history of the discovery stayed questionable, and publications from 1971 argue that the claims of André-Louis Debierne in 1904 conflict with the publications in 1899 and 1890, making Giesel the real discoverer of actinium. A less confrontational vision of scientific discovery is proposed by Adloff. He suggests that hindsight criticism of the early publications should be mitigated by the nascent state of radiochemistry, highlights the prudence of Debierne's claims in the original papers, and notes that nobody can contend that Debierne's substance did not contain actinium.
Friedrich Oskar Giesel | The discovery of emanium
Meitner was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". On her visit to the US in 1946, she received the honour "Woman of the Year" from the National Press Club and had dinner with the President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, at the Women's National Press Club. She received the Leibniz Medal from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1924, the Lieben Prize from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1925, the Ellen Richards Prize in 1928, the City of Vienna Prize for science in 1947, Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society jointly with Hahn in 1949, the inaugural Otto Hahn Prize of the German Chemical Society in 1954, the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1960, and in 1967, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
Lise Meitner | Awards and honours
The Berlin group started by irradiating uranium salt with neutrons from a radon-beryllium source similar to the one that Fermi had used. They dissolved it and added potassium perrhenate, platinum chloride and sodium hydroxide. What remained was then acidified with hydrogen sulphide, resulting in platinum sulphide and rhenium sulphide precipitation. Fermi had noted four radioactive isotopes with the longest-lived having 13- and 90-minute half-lives, and these were detected in the precipitate. The Berlin group then tested for protactinium by adding protactinium-234 to the solution. When this was precipitated, it was found to be separated from the 13- and 90-minute half-life isotopes, demonstrating that von Grosse was incorrect, and they were not isotopes of protactinium.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Research
Rona began her postdoctoral training in 1912 at the Animal Physiology Institute in Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, studying yeast as a reagent. In 1913 she transferred to Karlsruhe University, working under the direction of Kasimir Fajans, the discoverer of isotopes, for the next eight months. During the summer of 1914, she studied at University College London, but returned to Budapest at the outbreak of World War I. Taking a position at Budapest's Chemical Institute, she completed a scientific paper on the "diffusion constant of radon in water". Working with George de Hevesy, she was asked to verify a new element at the time was termed Uranium-Y, now known as Th-231.
Elizabeth Rona | Early career