Otto Hahn was born in Frankfurt am Main on 8 March 1879, the youngest son of Heinrich Hahn (1845–1922), a prosperous glazier (and founder of the Glasbau Hahn company), and Charlotte Hahn Giese (1845–1905). He had an older half-brother Karl, his mother's son from her previous marriage, and two older brothers, Heiner and Julius. The family lived above his father's workshop. The younger three boys were educated at "Klinger Oberrealschule" in Frankfurt. At the age of 15, he began to take a special interest in chemistry, and carried out simple experiments in the laundry room of the family home. His father wanted Otto to study architecture, as he had built or acquired several residential and business properties, but Otto persuaded him that his ambition was to become an industrial chemist.
Early life
Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn | Early life
He was from Frankfurt am Main Frankfurt am Main Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Frankfurt am Main
where do the nuclear and weak interaction forces occur
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In the Nuclear Fission
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what is this process about?
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The weak interaction, also known as the weak force or weak nuclear force, is the mechanism of interaction between subatomic particles responsible for the radioactive decay of atoms.
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what is meant by the process where it occur?
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Nuclear fission is a nuclear reaction or a radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller, lighter nuclei.
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who discovered it?
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German Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann
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where is the former from?
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He completed his one-year military service (instead of the usual two because he had a doctorate) in the 81st Infantry Regiment, but unlike his brothers, did not apply for a commission. He then returned to the University of Marburg, where he worked for two years as assistant to his doctoral supervisor, "Geheimrat" Professor Theodor Zincke.
Otto Hahn | Early life
His wife Edith only survived him by a fortnight. He was buried in the Stadtfriedhof in Göttingen. The day after his death, the Max Planck Society published the following obituary notice in all the major newspapers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland: Fritz Strassmann wrote: Otto Robert Frisch recalled:
Otto Hahn | Death
Otto Hahn was born in Frankfurt am Main on 8 March 1879, the youngest son of Heinrich Hahn (1845–1922), a prosperous glazier (and founder of the Glasbau Hahn company), and Charlotte Hahn Giese (1845–1905). He had an older half-brother Karl, his mother's son from her previous marriage, and two older brothers, Heiner and Julius. The family lived above his father's workshop. The younger three boys were educated at "Klinger Oberrealschule" in Frankfurt. At the age of 15, he began to take a special interest in chemistry, and carried out simple experiments in the laundry room of the family home. His father wanted Otto to study architecture, as he had built or acquired several residential and business properties, but Otto persuaded him that his ambition was to become an industrial chemist.
Otto Hahn | Early life
In 1906, Hahn returned to Germany, where Fischer placed at his disposal a former woodworking shop ("Holzwerkstatt") in the basement of the Chemical Institute to use as a laboratory. Hahn equipped it with electroscopes to measure alpha and beta particles and gamma rays. In Montreal these had been made from discarded coffee tins; Hahn made the ones in Berlin from brass, with aluminium strips insulated with amber. These were charged with hard rubber sticks that he rubbed then against the sleeves of his suit. It was not possible to conduct research in the wood shop, but Alfred Stock, the head of the inorganic chemistry department, let Hahn use a space in one of his two private laboratories.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of mesothorium I
Otto Hahn (8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist, and a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. Hahn is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry. Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered radioactive isotopes of radium, thorium, protactinium and uranium. He also discovered the phenomena of radioactive recoil and nuclear isomerism, and pioneered rubidium–strontium dating. In 1938, Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, for which Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Nuclear fission was the basis for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. A graduate of the University of Marburg, Hahn studied under Sir William Ramsay at University College London, and at McGill University in Montreal under Ernest Rutherford, where he discovered several new radioactive isotopes.
Otto Hahn | Introduction
In 1897, after taking his "Abitur", Hahn began to study chemistry at the University of Marburg. His subsidiary subjects were mathematics, physics, mineralogy and philosophy. Hahn joined the Students' Association of Natural Sciences and Medicine, a student fraternity and a forerunner of today's "Landsmannschaft Nibelungi" (Coburger Convent der akademischen Landsmannschaften und Turnerschaften). He spent his third and fourth semesters at the University of Munich, studying organic chemistry under Adolf von Baeyer, physical chemistry under Friedrich Wilhelm Muthmann, and inorganic chemistry under Karl Andreas Hofmann. In 1901, Hahn received his doctorate in Marburg for a dissertation entitled "On Bromine Derivates of Isoeugenol", a topic in classical organic chemistry.
Otto Hahn | Early life
While staying with relatives Max and Anna Doeschel in Cincinnati, Ohio, Hahn met fellow German immigrant Philip Hahn; they married in 1930. Hahn briefly returned to Germany to retrieve Oskar, then she and her husband started a family.
Anna Marie Hahn | Early life
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
Rutherford remarked that: "Hahn has a special nose for discovering new elements."
Otto Hahn | Discovery of radio thorium, and other "new elements"
Along the way, Hahn determined that just as he was unable to separate thorium from radiothorium, so he could not separate mesothorium from radium. Hahn completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907, and became a "Privatdozent". A thesis was not required; the Chemical Institute accepted one of his publications on radioactivity instead. Most of the organic chemists at the Chemical Institute did not regard Hahn's work as real chemistry. Fischer objected to Hahn's contention in his habilitation colloquium that many radioactive substances existed in such tiny amounts that they could only be detected by their radioactivity, venturing that he had always been able to detect substances with his keen sense of smell, but soon gave in.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of mesothorium I
Their only child, , was born on 9 April 1922. During World War II, he enlisted in the army in 1942, and served with distinction on the Eastern Front as a panzer commander. He lost an arm in combat. After the war he became a distinguished art historian and architectural researcher (at the Hertziana in Rome), known for his discoveries in the early Cistercian architecture of the 12th century. In August 1960, while on a study trip in France, Hanno died in a car accident, together with his wife and assistant Ilse Hahn Pletz. They left a fourteen-year-old son, Dietrich Hahn.
Otto Hahn | Marriage to Edith Junghans
Hahn was born in 1830 as the last child in his family, in Klingenmünster, Palatinate, then part of the Kingdom of Bavaria, now of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. His father died before he was born. Some sources indicate that Hahn's parents were Jewish. With his widowed mother and four older siblings, Hahn immigrated as a child to the United States, arriving in New York City. The family traveled to the Republic of Texas, before settling in New Orleans in 1840. The following year, Hahn's mother died of yellow fever and the children were orphaned. With the help of his older siblings, Hahn continued his education and graduated from City High School.
Michael Hahn | Early life and education
Hahn was born into a bourgeois family on 18 October 1818 in Aahof near Riga, Latvia. He studied Engineering at the Engineering School of the Russian Army from 1834 onwards but was not satisfied with that choice and, more generally, his parents' way of life. In 1837 he left Ādaži (Aahof) for Barmen (today part of Wuppertal, Germany) to apply at the missionary school of the Rhenish Missionary Society. He was admitted to the Missionary School in Elberfeld (also part of Wuppertal today) in 1838 and graduated in 1841.
Carl Hugo Hahn | Early life
As a consequence, at the end of the war he was arrested by the Allied forces, and was incarcerated in Farm Hall with nine other German scientists, from July 1945 to January 1946.
Otto Hahn | Introduction
At this point, Hahn decided that he first needed to know more about the subject, so he wrote to the leading expert on the field, Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford agreed to take Hahn on as an assistant, and Hahn's parents undertook to pay Hahn's expenses. From September 1905 until mid-1906, Hahn worked with Rutherford's group in the basement of the Macdonald Physics Building at McGill University in Montreal. There was some scepticism about the existence of radiothorium, which Bertram Boltwood memorably described as a compound of thorium X and stupidity. Boltwood was soon convinced that it did exist, although he and Hahn differed on what its half life was.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of radio thorium, and other "new elements"
Hans Hahne was born the son of a sugar manufacturer. He attended school in Artern and after 1885 in Berlin and Magdeburg, where he graduated in 1894 from the "Domgymnasium". At the Universities of Jena, Munich, and Leipzig, he studied natural sciences and medicine and received his MD in 1899. This was followed by specialist training in Bern, Berlin, and Leipzig. In 1902 Hahne settled in Magdeburg as an internist and neurologist, but closed his practice in 1905 to devote himself to prehistory and early history . In the years 1905-1907 Hahne studied prehistory under Gustaf Kossinna at the University of Berlin.
Hans Hahne (archaeologist) | Life
Hans Hahne died on 2 February 1935 in Halle.
Hans Hahne (archaeologist) | Life
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
He was a guest teacher at the University of Michigan, the State University of New York, the University of Paris and the University of Zurich, as well as being active in research, excavation and public relations. He led excavations in the Ach Valley and the caves of the Swabian Alb, where important discoveries were made, and he worked with some of the oldest man-made works of art. His publications number over 100. In 1997, at age 54, he died of complications of cancer.
Joachim Hahn | Introduction
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
After the war he became the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, while remaining in charge of his own department. Between 1934 and 1938, he worked with Strassmann and Meitner on the study of isotopes created through the neutron bombardment of uranium and thorium, which led to the discovery of nuclear fission. He was an opponent of national socialism and the persecution of Jews by the Nazi Party that caused the removal of many of his colleagues, including Meitner, who was forced to flee Germany in 1938. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear weapons program, cataloguing the fission products of uranium.
Otto Hahn | Introduction
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
He came from a German family. Initially he studied theology, but moved to medicine. He studied in Würzburg, Berlin, Rostock and Leipzig, where he defended his doctoral thesis. As a 14-year-old he was a member of a secret Polish student associations - Philomath.
Otton Steinborn | Early life
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. In May 1937, they issued parallel reports, one in "Zeitschrift für Physik" with Meitner as the principal author, and one in "Chemische Berichte" with Hahn as the principal author. Hahn concluded his by stating emphatically: "Vor allem steht ihre chemische Verschiedenheit von allen bisher bekannten Elementen außerhalb jeder Diskussion" ("Above all, their chemical distinction from all previously known elements needs no further discussion"); Meitner was increasingly uncertain.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of nuclear fission
The son of a university professor, Ambros attended school and passed his Abitur exam in Munich. In 1920 he went to the University of Munich to study chemistry and agricultural science. In 1925 he gained a doctorate, studying under the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry winner, Richard Willstätter.
Otto Ambros | Early life
(In fact, it was an isotope of the known element thorium; the concept of an isotope, along with the term, was only coined in 1913, by the British chemist Frederick Soddy). Ramsay was enthusiastic when yet another new element was found in his institute, and he intended to announce the discovery in a correspondingly suitable way. In accordance with tradition this was done before the committee of the venerable Royal Society. At the session of the Royal Society on 16 March 1905 Ramsay communicated Hahn's discovery of radiothorium. The "Daily Telegraph" informed its readers: Hahn published his results in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society" on 24 March 1905.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of radio thorium, and other "new elements"
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
Hahn was born in Königsberg. After studying theology at the universities of Breslau (Wrocław) and Berlin, he became successively a privatdozent at Breslau (1845), a professor "ad interim" (1846) at Königsberg on the death of Heinrich Havernick, an associate professor of theology (1851) and a full professor (1861) at the University of Greifswald.
Heinrich August Hahn | Life
At that time, the existence of actinides was not yet established, and uranium was wrongly believed to be a group 6 element similar to tungsten. It followed that first transuranic elements would be similar to group 7 to 10 elements, i.e. rhenium and platinoids. They established the presence of multiple isotopes of at least four such elements, and (mistakenly) identified them as elements with atomic numbers 93 through 96. They were the first scientists to measure the 23-minute half life of uranium-239 and to establish chemically that it was an isotope of uranium, but were unable to continue this work to its logical conclusion and identify the real element 93.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of nuclear fission
Frisch was born in Vienna in 1904 to a Jewish family, the son of Justinian Frisch, a painter, and Auguste Meitner Frisch, a concert pianist. He himself was talented at both but also shared his aunt Lise Meitner's love of physics and commenced a period of study at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1926 with some work on the effect of the newly discovered electron on salts.
Otto Robert Frisch | Early life
Otto Schoetensack (; July 12, 1850 in Stendal – December 23, 1912 in Ospedaletti) was a German industrialist and later professor of anthropology, having retired from the chemical firm which he had founded. During a 1908 archeological dig, he oversaw the worker Daniel Hartmann who found the lower jaw of a hominid, the oldest human fossil then known, which Schoetensack later described formally as "Homo heidelbergensis."
Otto Schoetensack | Introduction
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
He found that the proportion of uranium X to uranium Z extracted from several kilograms of uranyl nitrate remained constant over time, strongly indicating that uranium X was the mother of uranium Z. To prove this, Hahn obtained a hundred kilograms of uranyl nitrate; separating the uranium X from it took weeks. He found that the half life of the parent of uranium Z differed from the known 24 day half life of uranium X1 by no more than two or three days, but was unable to get a more accurate value. Hahn concluded that uranium Z and uranium X2 were both the same isotope of protactinium (protactinium-234), and they both decayed into uranium II (uranium-234), but with different half lives.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of nuclear isomerism
While Hahn was in North America, his attention was drawn to a mica-like mineral from Manitoba that contained rubidium. Some years before he had studied the radioactive decay of rubidium-87, and had estimated its half life at 2 x 10 years. It occurred to Hahn that by comparing the quantity of strontium in the mineral (which had once been rubidium) with that of the remaining rubidium, he could measure the age of the mineral, assuming that his original calculation of the half life was reasonably accurate. This would be a superior dating method to studying the decay of uranium, because some of the uranium turns into helium, which then escapes, resulting in rocks appearing to be younger than they really were.
Otto Hahn | Rubidium–strontium dating
It was the first of over 250 scientific publications of Otto Hahn in the field of radiochemistry. At the end of his time in London, Ramsay asked Hahn about his plans for the future, and Hahn told him about the job offer from Kalle & Co. Ramsay told him radiochemistry had a bright future, and that someone who had discovered a new radioactive element should go to the University of Berlin. Ramsay wrote to Emil Fischer, the head of the chemistry institute there, who replied that Hahn could work in his laboratory, but could not be a "Privatdozent" because radiochemistry was not taught there.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of radio thorium, and other "new elements"
In Paris he met Auguste Rodin and discovered medieval art. In 1910 he left Paris and travelled to Great Britain, Belgium, and Germany before returning to Prague.
Otto Gutfreund | Early life
In December 1938, German chemist Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to the German science journal "Naturwissenschaften" ("Natural Sciences") reporting that they had detected and identified the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons. Their article was published on 6 January 1939. On 19 December 1938, eighteen days before the publication, Otto Hahn communicated these results and his conclusion of a "bursting" of the uranium nucleus in a letter to his colleague and friend Lise Meitner, who had fled Germany in July to the Netherlands and then to Sweden. Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch confirmed Hahn's conclusion of a "bursting" and correctly interpreted the results as "nuclear fission" – a term coined by Frisch.
German nuclear weapons program | Discovery of nuclear fission
• Biographischer Eintrag in the Online-Documentation of the anthroposophical Forschungsstelle Kulturimpuls
Herbert Hahn | External links
Additionally, he made the acquaintance of several scientists in the various towns where he stayed and managed to acquire a number of valuable manuscripts and books.
Otto Thott | Early life and education
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
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
He completed his PhD at the University of Vienna in 1926 with the dissertion "Altnordische Lehnwortstudien", which examined loanwords in Old Norse.
Otto Höfler | Early life and education
The scientific value of Hahn's lifework in natural history varies. His ornithological work, for example, never had any discernible influence on this field. Hahn's work on the true bugs (Heteroptera), though, is just as important as his works on spiders (Araneae). One species of bug even carries his name: "Lopus hahni" . He was also given this honour in the field of arachnology: Carl Ludwig Koch, who continued ""Die Arachniden"" after Hahn's death, called a genus after him in 1841 ("Hahnia"), on which later the name of the whole family was based – Hahniidae . Hahn died in Nuremberg on 7 November 1835, "of a lung complaint in the prime of life".
Carl Wilhelm Hahn | Life and lifework
Hahn was born on 14 April 1914 in Gotha, at the time in Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, present-day in Thuringia. His parents were Arthur, a "Finanzrat" (Fiscal Council), and his mother Helene. He also had an older sister named Käte. A talented athlete, he was selected to participate in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin in the Pentathlon, but he had to withdraw due to illness. His friends initially nicknamed him "Hansi", a diminutive of his first name Hans, which over time was abbreviated and altered to "Assi". Hahn enlisted in the "Reichswehr" on 1 April 1934, as a "Fahnenjunker" (officer candidate) in 14.
Hans &quot;Assi&quot; Hahn | Early life and career
Hahn was thinking only of actinium, but on reading his paper, Meitner told him that he had found a new way of detecting radioactive substances. They set up some tests, and soon found actinium C (thallium-207) and thorium C (thallium-208). The physicist Walther Gerlach described radioactive recoil as "a profoundly significant discovery in physics with far-reaching consequences". In 1910, Hahn was appointed professor by the Prussian Minister of Culture and Education, August von Trott zu Solz. Two years later, Hahn became head of the Radioactivity Department of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem (in what is today the Hahn-Meitner-Building of the Free University of Berlin).
Otto Hahn | Discovery of radioactive recoil
The result was surprising because of the large difference in atomic number of the two elements, uranium having atomic number 92 and barium having atomic number 56. In December 1938, Hahn and Strassmann sent a manuscript to "Naturwissenschaften" reporting the results of their experiments on detection of barium as a product of neutron bombardment of uranium Otto Frisch confirmed Strassman and Hahn's report experimentally on 13 January 1939. Frisch and Meitner explained Strassman's and Hahn's findings as being from nuclear fission.
Fritz Strassmann | Career
Friedrich Wilhelm "Fritz" Strassmann (; 22 February 1902 – 22 April 1980) was a German chemist who, with Otto Hahn in early 1939, identified the element barium as a product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons. Their observation was the key piece of evidence necessary to identify the previously unknown phenomenon of nuclear fission, as was subsequently recognized and published by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch.
Fritz Strassmann | Introduction
Hans Petterson was born in Forshalla near Gothenburg on 26 August 1888, the son of the chemist and oceanographer Otto Pettersson (1848-1941). Hans Petterson studied Sciences at Uppsala University, graduating in 1909. He then studied atomic physics as a postgraduate at the Institute for Radium Research, Vienna.
Hans Pettersson | Early life
Born in Lexington, Kentucky, Hahn was educated in its public schools before going to the University of Kentucky, where he graduated "with highest honors," receiving a B.S. degree in physics in 1945 at the age of 18. After graduation he served in the U.S. Navy and was a physicist for U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory. After his navy service, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D. in physics in 1949.
T. Marshall Hahn | Early life and education
About this time, he also began to study etching with Sion Wenban (1848-1897), an artist from Cincinnati.
Otto Henry Bacher | Early life
Otto Hahn (1828 – 1904) was a German petrologist, geologist, lawyer and author. His father was Johann Franz Gottlieb Hahn (1789 – 1844). His great-grandfather was Christian Tobias Hahn (1759 – 1837), who was the half-brother of Philipp Matthäus Hahn. Hahn started his career as a lawyer. He eventually left the legal profession for the natural sciences. The University of Tübingen awarded him a doctorate for his participation in the Eozoön canadense controversy. He was an active member of The New Church (Swedenborgian) and was a Neptunist. He published "Die Urzelle" in 1879. His book "Die Meteorite (Chondrite) und ihre Organismen", published the following year in 1880, was a major work in the field of meteoritics that included 142 black and white photomicrographs of chondrite thin sections.
Otto Hahn (petrologist) | Introduction
Happel received his PhD in engineering from RWTH Aachen University.
Otto Happel | Early life
Uranium Z was the first example of nuclear isomerism. Walther Gerlach later remarked that this was "a discovery that was not understood at the time but later became highly significant for nuclear physics". Not until 1936 was Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker able to provide a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon. For this discovery, whose full significance was recognised by very few, Hahn was again proposed for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by Bernhard Naunyn, Goldschmidt and Planck.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of nuclear isomerism
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 this latter work Hahn proposed the theory that the chondrites consist entirely of fossilized organic remains of life-forms, namely, fossilized sponges, corals, and crinoids. In addition, he claimed that the iron meteorites have an organic origin and that they are the petrified remains of a fungus or plant that was permeated with iron-nickel alloys, e.g. similar to ichnotaxa like the "Chondrites".
Otto Hahn (petrologist) | Introduction
Hans Hahne (18 Mar 1875, Piesdorf–2 Feb 1935, Halle (Saale) ) was a German physician and prehistorian.
Hans Hahne (archaeologist) | Introduction
Hahn's intention was still to work in industry. He received an offer of employment from Eugen Fischer, the director of (and the father of organic chemist Hans Fischer), but a condition of employment was that Hahn had to have lived in another country and have a reasonable command of another language. With this in mind, and to improve his knowledge of English, Hahn took up a post at University College London in 1904, working under Sir William Ramsay, who was known for having discovered the inert gases. Here Hahn worked on radiochemistry, at that time a very new field. In early 1905, in the course of his work with salts of radium, Hahn discovered a new substance he called radiothorium (thorium-228), which at that time was believed to be a new radioactive element.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of radio thorium, and other "new elements"
Jacob Papish helped Hahn obtain several kilograms of the mineral. From 1,012 grams of the mineral, Strassmann and Ernst Walling extracted 253.4 milligrams of strontium carbonate, all of which was the strontium-87 isotope, indicating that it had all been produced from radioactive decay of rubidium-87. The age of the mineral had been estimated at 1,975 million years from uranium minerals in the same deposit, which implied that the half life of rubidium-87 was 2.3 x 10 years: quite close to Hahn's original calculation. Rubidium–strontium dating became a widely used technique for dating rocks in the 1950s, when mass spectrometry became common.
Otto Hahn | Rubidium–strontium dating
Hahn left home to attend medical school at Technical University Munich, Munich, Germany, where she gained her M.D. degree in 1981. She worked as an intern at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1981 to 1982. She attained her Doctorate in Medicine from Technical University Munich in 1982. Her doctoral thesis was influenced by her upbringing and early childhood. Hahn remembered herding and milking cows as a child. Reflecting on how integral a role cattle played in rural Bavaria, Hahn wondered if the close relationship of people and cattle could be detrimental to the humans, through exposure to bovine virus.
Beatrice Hahn | Early life and education
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
This article is based on a translation of the equivalent article on German Wikipedia
Otto Hahn Prize | References
Johann Georg Hagen was born in Bregenz, Austria. He was the son of a school teacher.
Johann Georg Hagen | Early life
He grew up in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. He received his B.S. in Physics from Juniata College and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He served in the U.S. Navy.
Erwin Hahn | Education
That summer Hahn was accidentally poisoned by phosgene while testing a new model gas mask. At the end of the war he was in the field in mufti on a secret mission to test a pot that heated and released a cloud of arsenicals.
Otto Hahn | World War I
Hahn was shot in the back by a disgruntled inventor in October 1951, injured in a motor vehicle accident in 1952, and had a minor heart attack in 1953. In 1962, he published a book, "Vom Radiothor zur Uranspaltung". It was released in English in 1966 with the title "Otto Hahn: A Scientific Autobiography", with an introduction by Glenn Seaborg. The success of this book may have prompted him to write another, fuller autobiography, "Otto Hahn. Mein Leben", but before it could be published, he fractured one of the vertebrae in his neck while getting out of a car. He gradually became weaker and died in Göttingen on 28 July 1968.
Otto Hahn | Death
William Henry Bragg and Richard Kleeman had noted that the alpha particles emitted from radioactive substances always had the same energy, providing a second way of identifying them, so Hahn set about measuring the alpha particle emissions of radiothorium. In the process, he found that a precipitation of thorium A (polonium-216) and thorium B (lead-212) also contained a short-lived "element", which he named thorium C (which was later identified as polonium-212). Hahn was unable to separate it, and concluded that it had a very short half life (it is about 300 ns). He also identified radioactinium (thorium-227) and radium D (later identified as lead-210).
Otto Hahn | Discovery of radio thorium, and other "new elements"
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, 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
Thorman was born on April 12, 1887 in Washington, Missouri. He attended the St. Louis Art Institute.
Otto H. Thorman | Early life
Hahn refused medical evaluation for radiation exposure. EPA scientists believe that Hahn's life expectancy may have been greatly shortened by his exposure to radioactivity, particularly since he spent long periods in the small, enclosed shed with large amounts of radioactive material and only minimal safety precautions, but he refused their recommendation that he be examined at the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station.
David Hahn | Creation of the neutron source
This came with an annual salary of 5,000 marks. In addition, he received 66,000 marks in 1914 (of which he gave 10 per cent to Meitner) from Knöfler for the mesothorium process. The new institute was inaugurated on 23 October 1912 in a ceremony presided over by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Kaiser was shown glowing radioactive substances in a dark room. 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 then decayed and settled as radioactive dust, making sensitive measurements impossible.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of radioactive recoil
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
The National Academy of Sciences noted him for, "his pioneering discoveries of fossils that have illuminated life's early evolution, from Archean stromatolites and Proterozoic cyanobacteria, to the rise of multicellular organisms."
Hans J. Hofmann | Introduction
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
After the end of the First World War (which was followed by the transfer of Strasbourg, where the family had been living, to France), Hahnemann's mother fled, with her two sons across the Rhine, to Kehl, now on Germany's western frontier. He successfully completed his Abitur (final exam programme) at the (senior school) in Karlsruhe, a short distance to the north.
Paul G. Hahnemann | Early years
Otto Brauneck was born on 27 February 1896 in Sulzbach, the German Empire.
Otto Brauneck | Early life
Joachim Hahn (12 August 1942 in – 27 April 1997) was a German archaeologist and expert on the Upper Paleolithic era. Beginning in 1962, he studied at the University of Cologne, University of Bordeaux and the University of Tübingen. At the latter, he was promoted to research fellow in 1973. He published a thesis in 1977 at the University of Cologne, entitled "The Aurignacian in Central and Eastern Europe", and subsequently published several more papers. Beginning in 1985, Hahn was a prehistory and early history professor and member of the Academic Council at the University of Tübingen, where he was promoted to adjunct professor in 1988.
Joachim Hahn | Introduction
The seeds of Tholstrup's adventurous streak were planted by meeting Thor Heyerdahl as a school boy in his native Denmark. He emigrated to Australia in 1964, settling initially in Darwin where he found employment as a buffalo hunter, schoolteacher, miner and stockman.
Hans Tholstrup | Early life
From 1907 he became assistant at the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hannover, where he was appointed assistant director in 1908. At the same time he was an adjunct professor at the Leibniz University Hannover. In 1912 Hahne was appointed director of the Halle State Museum of Prehistory. In World War I he was exempted from military service due to a heart and liver disease. At the University of Halle, he received his doctorate in February 1918 with his thesis "Die geologische Lagerung der Moorleichen und Moorbrücken als Beitrag zur Forschung der erdgeschichtlichen Vorgänge der Nacheiszeit " ("The geological stratification of bog bodies and bog villages as a contribution to the research of geological processes of the post-glacial period").
Hans Hahne (archaeologist) | Life
He commenced work on his first ornithological work, "Birds from Asia, Africa, America and New Holland". When his "often promised and well earned position" failed to materialize, Hahn undertook what was for that time, in his field, a very unusual step and went freelance. From then on, he called himself a natural historian and occasionally also a scholar. On 24 February 1820, having in the meantime qualified as a Dr. Phil. at the University of Erlangen, he married Victoria Francisca Kaltdorff, née Schaefer. His wife, the widow of a doctor of medicine, was about five years older than he, and had three children by her previous marriage.
Carl Wilhelm Hahn | Life and lifework
Otto Koppen graduated with a Bachelor of Science from MIT in 1924.
Otto C. Koppen | Early life
Hanle and Joos would soon be part of the impetus to initiate the German nuclear energy project, shortly after Hanle went to Göttingen. From 1937 to 1941, Hanle was again at the University of Göttingen. 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, who had in July of that year fled to The Netherlands and then went to Sweden. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission.
Wilhelm Hanle | Career
Otto Esswein was born in Waiblingen, in the Kingdom of Württemberg within the German Empire, on 3 March 1890.
Otto Esswein | Early life
Otto Schlüter studied geography, geology, mineralogy, and philosophy between 1891 and 1898, first in Freiburg im Breisgau, and later in Halle and Berlin. After teaching at the University of Berlin and University of Bonn, in 1911 he became a professor of geography at the University of Halle.
Otto Schlüter | Early life and education
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
He was an honorary fellow of University College London,
Otto Hahn | Honors and awards
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 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.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of nuclear fission
Friedrich II. Graf von Hahn (July 27, 1742 – October 9, 1805) was a German nobleman, a philosopher and astronomer born in Neuhaus, Holstein, Germany. He suggested the Doppler effect before Doppler.
Friedrich von Hahn | Introduction
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!
Frank Otto Haubold was born March 23, 1906 Union City, New Jersey.
Frank Haubold | Early life
Lindholm was born on the island of Utö. He spent his youth duck hunting and fishing.
Otto Wilhelm Lindholm | Early years
Hahn was born on the East Side of New York City. Her flair for mimicry became evident when she was two years old, leading to popularity on the Borscht Belt. While still a youngster, she expanded her repertoire of skills by learning ventriloquism and adding it to her act. Her mother was Elizabeth Egerman.
Pauline Hahn | Early years
Carl Wilhelm Christian Hahn was born in Weingartsgreuth, Upper Franconia, as the first son of Johann Michael Hahn (1734–1824), who was court and palace gardener on the estate of Baron von Seckendorff, later palace gardener for Count Friedrich von Pückler. He obeyed the general call to arms as early as 1813, and served as a quartermaster, and in 1816, received his honourable discharge. Afterwards, he lived with his parents in Fürth, and according to Hahn, made up his mind to devote his life to his predilection for natural history, an interest he had possessed since early childhood and which intensified during his studies in Erlangen.
Carl Wilhelm Hahn | Life and lifework
Born was born in Berlin. He trained and educated as a radiochemist under Otto Hahn at the "Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Chemie". Upon receipt of his doctorate, he was then an "Assistent" (Assistant) to Hahn, in the 1930s.
Hans-Joachim Born | Education
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, now under Strassmann, built and renovated new accommodation in Mainz, but work proceeded slowly, and it did not relocate from Tailfingen until 1949. Hahn's insistence on retaining Ernst Telschow as the general secretary nearly caused a rebellion against his presidency. In his efforts to rebuild German science, Hahn was generous in issuing "persilschein" (whitewash certificates), writing one for Gottfried von Droste, who had joined the "Sturmabteilung" (SA) in 1933 and the NSDAP in 1937, and wore his SA uniform at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, and for Heinrich Hörlein and Fritz ter Meer from IG Farben.
Otto Hahn | Founder and President of the Max Planck Society
Hahn was born in the German state of Saxony and raised near Chemnitz. His father had been a senior manager of the German car and motorcycle company DKW and was a co-founder of the Auto Union in 1932, which later evolved into the Audi car brand. As a college student, he studied business administration at the University of Cologne and the University of Zurich, economics and politics in Great Britain and France. In 1952, Hahn received his doctorate in Economics at the University of Berne in Switzerland. He went to Perugia for a year to study art history, intending to volunteer at Fiat.
Carl Hahn | Early life and education
She obtained her doctorate in 1933 from Frederick William University and then worked for a year as a volunteer at an Ethnological Research Institute that was affiliated with the Ethnological Museum of Berlin.
Karin Hahn-Hissink | Early life and education
After joining the Austrian army in 1915, he was badly wounded in 1916 and became again Professor extraordinarius, now in Bonn. In 1917 he was nominated a regular Professor there and in 1921 he returned to Vienna with this title, where he stayed until his rather early death in 1934 at the age of 54, following cancer surgery. He had married Eleonore ("Lilly") Minor in 1909 and they had a daughter, Nora (born 1910). He was also interested in philosophy, and was part of a discussion group concerning Mach's positivism with Otto Neurath and Phillip Frank prior to the First World War.
Hans Hahn (mathematician) | Biography
Hahn reported to the HWA on the progress of his research. Together with his assistants, Hans-Joachim Born, Siegfried Flügge, Hans Götte, Walter Seelmann-Eggebert and Strassmann, he catalogued about one hundred fission product isotopes. They also investigated means of isotope separation; the chemistry of element 93; and methods for purifying uranium oxides and salts. On the night of 15 February 1944, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry building was struck by a bomb. Hahn's office was destroyed, along with his correspondence with Rutherford and other researchers, and many of his personal possessions. The office was the intended target of the raid, which had been ordered by Brigadier General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, in the hope of disrupting the German uranium project.
Otto Hahn | World War II
He was appointed professor in May and habilitated in November 1918 at the University of Hannover in prehistory (Prehistoric Archeology). In 1921 Hahne was appointed associate professor, in November 1933 full professor; shortly afterwards he was appointed rector of the University of Halle. As a "Volkish" scientist, he also incorporated anthroposophical influences into his theories. Before 1933 Hahne joined the National Socialist Party and was Deputy District Culture Warden ("Gaukulturwart"), Director of Training in Racial Science ("Rassenkunde") in Gau Mitteldeutschland (Saxony) of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office ("Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt"). In February 1934, Hahne suffered a severe stroke with paralysis on his left side, which hindered him so much that he had to turn over most of his duties to colleagues.
Hans Hahne (archaeologist) | Life