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The Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association, Inc. "Preserving, Exhibiting, Interpreting and Teaching the History of the Manhattan Project" |
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Manhattan Project History
The Early Years (1900 - 1939)
"Early Enlightenment"
| "It is probable that all heavy matter possesses - latent and bound up with the structure of the atom - a similar quantity of energy to that possessed by radium. If it could be tapped and controlled what an agent it would be in changing the world's destiny! The man who put his hand on the lever by which a parsimonious nature regulates so jealously the output of this store of energy would possess a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose." - Frederick Soddy; Lecturing on radium to the Corp. of Royal Engineers; 1904 |
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"As the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbs one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a chain reaction" - Leo Szilard; Walking in downtown London; September 1933. |
During the early part of the twentieth century, several physicists and chemists toyed with the idea of obtaining energy from atoms. However, because so little was known about the actual structure of the atom (Rutherford thought the nucleus was solid, like a billiard ball and Bohr thought it was elastic, like the surface tension on a drop of water), proof was hard to come by. However, that didn't prevent scientists of the day from "postulating the future". Perhaps no one was a "postulator" more so than Leo Szilard, the Hungarian theoretical physicist, born of Jewish heritage in Budapest on February 11, 1898. From an early age of his studies, similar to Canadian, Frederick Soddy, he envisioned "atomic energy" as a potential weapon for mass destruction. This early enlightenment was a major "steering force" in Szilard's illustrious career. During the 1920's and early 30's, scientists from around the world worked to unravel the mystery of the atom. From Ernest Rutherford and James Chadwick in England; from Niels Bohr, Edward Teller, Otto Frisch and others in Copenhagen; from Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Franz Strassman in Germany; from Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segre in Italy; from Hans Bethe, Ernest O. Lawrence, Robert Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton, and John Dunning in the United States; to Frederic Joliot and Irene Curie-Joliot in France - all raced to explain the conflicting results obtained from hundreds of innovative experiments. It was a time of unrelenting cooperation amongst scientists everywhere; findings were being published almost on a daily basis. It was a period often referred to as "the beautiful years". In January of 1933, as Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, this period was swiftly coming to a close!
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