70 Facts About Leo Szilard

Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-German-American physicist and inventor.

Leo Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea in 1936, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.

Leo Szilard wrote his doctoral thesis on Maxwell's demon, a long-standing puzzle in the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics.

Leo Szilard was the first scientist of note to recognize the connection between thermodynamics and information theory.

Leo Szilard moved to England, where he helped found the Academic Assistance Council, an organization dedicated to helping refugee scholars find new jobs.

Leo Szilard was present when this was achieved within the Chicago Pile-1 on December 2,1942.

Leo Szilard worked for the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago on aspects of nuclear reactor design.

Leo Szilard drafted the Szilard petition advocating a demonstration of the atomic bomb, but the Interim Committee chose to use them against cities without warning.

Leo Szilard publicly sounded the alarm against the possible development of salted thermonuclear bombs, a new kind of nuclear weapon that might annihilate mankind.

Leo Szilard helped found the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he became a resident fellow.

Leo Szilard founded Council for a Livable World in 1962 to deliver "the sweet voice of reason" about nuclear weapons to Congress, the White House, and the American public.

Leo Szilard died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1964.

Leo Szilard was born as Leo Spitz in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, on February 11,1898.

Leo Szilard had two younger siblings, a brother, Bela, born in 1900, and a sister, Rozsi, born in 1901.

Leo Szilard enrolled as an engineering student at the Palatine Joseph Technical University, which he entered in September 1916.

Leo Szilard rejoined his regiment in May 1918 but in September, before being sent to the front, he fell ill with Spanish Influenza and was returned home for hospitalization.

Leo Szilard was discharged honorably in November 1918, after the Armistice.

In January 1919, Leo Szilard resumed his engineering studies, but Hungary was in a chaotic political situation with the rise of the Hungarian Soviet Republic under Bela Kun.

Leo Szilard was convinced that socialism was the answer to Hungary's post-war problems, but not that of Kun's Hungarian Socialist Party, which had close ties to the Soviet Union.

Leo Szilard became bored with engineering, and his attention turned to physics.

Leo Szilard met fellow Hungarian students Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Dennis Gabor.

The problem was thought to be insoluble, but in tackling it Leo Szilard recognized the connection between thermodynamics and information theory.

Leo Szilard was appointed as assistant to von Laue at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1924.

Leo Szilard was the first person to conceive the idea of the electron microscope, and submitted the earliest patent for one in 1928.

Leo Szilard did not build all of these devices, or publish these ideas in scientific journals, and so credit for them often went to others.

Leo Szilard received German citizenship in 1930, but was already uneasy about the political situation in Europe.

Leo Szilard was so annoyed at Rutherford's dismissal that, on the same day, he conceived of the idea of nuclear chain reaction, using recently discovered neutrons.

The idea did not use the mechanism of nuclear fission, which was not yet discovered, but Leo Szilard realized that if neutrons could initiate any sort of energy-producing nuclear reaction, such as the one that had occurred in lithium, and could be produced themselves by the same reaction, energy might be obtained with little input, since the reaction would be self-sustaining.

Leo Szilard filed for a patent on the concept of the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction in June 1934, which was granted in March 1936.

Under section 30 of the Patents and Designs Act, Leo Szilard was able to assign the patent to the British Admiralty to ensure its secrecy, which he did.

In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change.

When Leo Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning.

In early 1934, Leo Szilard began working at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London.

Leo Szilard attempted unsuccessfully to create a nuclear chain reaction using beryllium by bombarding it with X-rays.

Leo Szilard visited Bela and Rose and her husband Roland Detre, in Switzerland in September 1937.

In November 1938, Leo Szilard moved to New York City, taking a room at the King's Crown Hotel near Columbia University.

Leo Szilard encountered John R Dunning, who invited him to speak about his research at an afternoon seminar in January 1939.

When Leo Szilard found out about it on a visit to Wigner at Princeton University, he immediately realized that uranium might be the element capable of sustaining a chain reaction.

Unable to convince Fermi that this was the case, Leo Szilard set out on his own.

Leo Szilard obtained permission from the head of the Physics Department at Columbia, George B Pegram, to use a laboratory for three months.

Leo Szilard wired Frederick Lindemann at Oxford and asked him to send a beryllium cylinder.

Leo Szilard persuaded Walter Zinn to become his collaborator, and hired Semyon Krewer to investigate processes for manufacturing pure uranium and graphite.

Leo Szilard then suggested Fermi use carbon, in the form of graphite.

Leo Szilard felt he would need about 50 tonnes of graphite and 5 tonnes of uranium.

Fermi and Leo Szilard met with representatives of National Carbon Company, who manufactured graphite, and Leo Szilard made another important discovery.

Leo Szilard asked about impurities in graphite, and learned that it usually contained boron, a neutron absorber.

In January 1942, Leo Szilard joined the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago as a research associate, and later the chief physicist.

Alvin Weinberg noted that Leo Szilard served as the project "gadfly", asking all the embarrassing questions.

Leo Szilard made suggestions that improved the uranium canning process, and worked with David Gurinsky and Ed Creutz on a method for recovering uranium from its salts.

Leo Szilard argued that if this was a concern, then liquid bismuth would be a better choice.

Leo Szilard supervised experiments with it, but the practical difficulties turned out to be too great.

Leo Szilard was therefore present on December 2,1942, when the first man-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was achieved in the first nuclear reactor under viewing stands of Stagg Field, and shook Fermi's hand.

Leo Szilard became a naturalized citizen of the United States in March 1943.

Leo Szilard was the co-holder, with Fermi, of the patent on the nuclear reactor.

Leo Szilard continued to work with Fermi and Wigner on nuclear reactor design, and is credited with coining the term "breeder reactor".

Leo Szilard drafted the Szilard petition advocating that the atomic bomb be demonstrated to the enemy, and used only if the enemy did not then surrender.

In 1946, Leo Szilard secured a research professorship at the University of Chicago that allowed him to research in biology and the social sciences.

Leo Szilard teamed up with Aaron Novick, a chemist who had worked at the Metallurgical Laboratory during the war.

Leo Szilard married Trude Weiss, a physician, in a civil ceremony in New York on October 13,1951.

Weiss took up a teaching position at the University of Colorado in April 1950, and Leo Szilard began staying with her in Denver for weeks at a time when they had never been together for more than a few days before.

Single people living together was frowned upon in the conservative United States at the time and, after they were discovered by one of her students, Leo Szilard began to worry that she might lose her job.

Many of his friends were shocked, having considered Leo Szilard a born bachelor.

In 1949 Leo Szilard wrote a short story titled "My Trial as a War Criminal" in which he imagined himself on trial for crimes against humanity after the United States lost a war with the Soviet Union.

Leo Szilard publicly sounded the alarm against the possible development of salted thermonuclear bombs, explaining in a University of Chicago Round Table radio program on February 26,1950, that sufficiently big thermonuclear bomb rigged with specific but common materials, might annihilate mankind.

Leo Szilard published a book of short stories, The Voice of the Dolphins, in which he dealt with the moral and ethical issues raised by the Cold War and his own role in the development of atomic weapons.

Leo Szilard underwent cobalt therapy at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital using a cobalt 60 treatment regimen that his doctors gave him a high degree of control over.

Leo Szilard spent his last years as a fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, which he had helped to create.

Leo Szilard founded Council for a Livable World in 1962 to deliver "the sweet voice of reason" about nuclear weapons to Congress, the White House, and the American public.

Leo Szilard was appointed a non-resident fellow there in July 1963, and became a resident fellow on April 1,1964, after moving to San Diego in February.

Leo Szilard's papers are in the library at the University of California, San Diego.