105 Facts About Otto Hahn

1.

Otto Hahn was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry.

2.

Otto Hahn is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission.

3.

Otto Hahn returned to Germany in 1906; 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.

4.

Otto Hahn completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907 and became a Privatdozent.

5.

Otto Hahn 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.

6.

Otto Hahn served as the last president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science in 1946 and as the founding president of its successor, the Max Planck Society from 1948 to 1960.

7.

Otto Hahn was born in Frankfurt am Main on 8 March 1879, the youngest son of Heinrich Hahn, a prosperous glazier, and Charlotte Hahn Giese.

8.

Otto Hahn had an older half-brother Karl, his mother's son from her previous marriage, and two older brothers, Heiner and Julius.

9.

Otto Hahn's 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.

10.

In 1897, after taking his Abitur, Otto Hahn began to study chemistry at the University of Marburg.

11.

Otto Hahn joined the Students' Association of Natural Sciences and Medicine, a student fraternity and a forerunner of today's Landsmannschaft Nibelungi.

12.

Otto Hahn 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.

13.

In 1901, Otto Hahn received his doctorate in Marburg for a dissertation entitled "On Bromine Derivates of Isoeugenol", a topic in classical organic chemistry.

14.

Otto Hahn completed his one-year military service in the 81st Infantry Regiment, but unlike his brothers, did not apply for a commission.

15.

Otto Hahn then returned to the University of Marburg, where he worked for two years as assistant to his doctoral supervisor, Geheimrat professor Theodor Zincke.

16.

In early 1905, in the course of his work with salts of radium, Otto Hahn discovered a new substance he called radiothorium, which at that time was believed to be a new radioactive element.

17.

Dr Otto Hahn, who is working at University College, has discovered a new radioactive element, extracted from a mineral from Ceylon, named Thorianite, and possibly, it is conjectured, the substance which renders thorium radioactive.

18.

Otto Hahn published his results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on 24 May 1905.

19.

At this point, Otto Hahn decided that he first needed to know more about the subject, so he wrote to the leading expert on the field, Ernest Rutherford.

20.

From September 1905 until mid-1906, Otto Hahn worked with Rutherford's group in the basement of the Macdonald Physics Building at McGill University in Montreal.

21.

Boltwood was convinced that it did exist, although he and Otto Hahn differed on what its half life was.

22.

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 Otto Hahn set about measuring the alpha particle emissions of radiothorium.

23.

Otto Hahn was unable to separate it, and concluded that it had a very short half life.

24.

In 1906, Otto Hahn returned to Germany, where Fischer placed at his disposal a former woodworking shop in the basement of the Chemical Institute to use as a laboratory.

25.

Otto Hahn equipped it with electroscopes to measure alpha and beta particles and gamma rays.

26.

In Montreal these had been made from discarded coffee tins; Otto Hahn made the ones in Berlin from brass, with aluminium strips insulated with amber.

27.

Hahn purchased two milligrams of radium from Friedrich Oskar Giesel, the discoverer of emanium, for 100 marks a milligram, and obtained thorium for free from Otto Knofler, whose Berlin firm was a major producer of thorium products.

28.

Along the way, Otto Hahn determined that just as he was unable to separate thorium from radiothorium, so he could not separate mesothorium from radium.

29.

Otto Hahn completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907, and became a Privatdozent.

30.

In Montreal, Otto Hahn had worked with physicists including at least one woman, Harriet Brooks, but it was difficult for Meitner at first.

31.

Otto Hahn pursued a report by Stefan Meyer and Egon Schweidler of a decay product of actinium with a half-life of about 11.8 days.

32.

Otto 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.

33.

In 1910, Otto Hahn was appointed professor by the Prussian Minister of Culture and Education, August von Trott zu Solz.

34.

Two years later, Otto Hahn became head of the Radioactivity Department of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem.

35.

In June 1911, while attending a conference in Stettin, Otto Hahn met Edith Junghans, a student at the Royal School of Art in Berlin.

36.

Otto Hahn was awarded the Iron Cross for his part in the First Battle of Ypres.

37.

Otto Hahn was a joyful participant in the Christmas truce of 1914, and was commissioned as a lieutenant.

38.

Otto Hahn raised the issue that the Hague Convention banned the use of projectiles containing poison gases, but Haber explained that the French had already initiated chemical warfare with tear gas grenades, and he planned to get around the letter of the convention by releasing gas from cylinders instead of shells.

39.

Otto Hahn did not witness the attack because he and Franck were off selecting a position for the next attack.

40.

Some German troops were reluctant to advance when the gas started to blow back, so Otto Hahn led them across No Man's land.

41.

Otto Hahn witnessed the death agonies of Russians they had poisoned, and unsuccessfully attempted to revive some with gas masks.

42.

Otto Hahn was transferred to Berlin as a human guinea pig testing poisonous gases and gas masks.

43.

Between operations, Otto Hahn returned to Berlin, where he was able to slip back to his old laboratory and work with Meitner, continuing with their research.

44.

That summer Otto Hahn was accidentally poisoned by phosgene while testing a new model gas mask.

45.

Otto Hahn joined the new gas command unit at Imperial Headquarters in Berlin in December 1916 after travelling between the western and eastern front, Berlin and Leverkusen between the summer of 1914 and late 1916.

46.

Fajans agreed to Meitner and Otto Hahn naming the element protoactinmium, and assigning it the chemical symbol Pa.

47.

When Otto 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.

48.

Otto Hahn dissolved uranium salts in a hydrofluoric acid solution with tantalic acid.

49.

Otto 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.

50.

Otto Hahn determined that uranium Z had a half life of around 6.7 hours 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.

51.

Otto Hahn 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.

52.

Otto Hahn 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.

53.

Otto Hahn concluded that uranium Z and uranium X2 were both the same isotope of protactinium, and they both decayed into uranium II, but with different half lives.

54.

In 1924, Otto Hahn was elected to full membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, by a vote of thirty white balls to two black.

55.

Meitner became the director of the Physical Radioactivity Division, while Otto Hahn headed the Chemical Radioactivity Division.

56.

In 1936 Cornell University Press published a book in English titled Applied Radiochemistry, which contained the lectures given by Otto Hahn when he was a visiting professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1933.

57.

Otto Hahn is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry, which emerged from applied radiochemistry.

58.

Fritz Strassmann had come to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry to study under Otto Hahn to improve his employment prospects.

59.

Otto Hahn spent February to June 1933 in the United States and Canada as a visiting professor at Cornell University.

60.

Otto Hahn gave an interview to the Toronto Star Weekly in which he painted a flattering portrait of Adolf Hitler:.

61.

Otto Hahn began as a nobody, and you see what he has become in ten years.

62.

Otto Hahn therefore did not have to fire any of his own full-time staff, but as the interim director of Haber's institute, he dismissed a quarter of its staff, including three department heads.

63.

Otto Hahn brokered a deal whereby 10 per cent of the funds would be allocated to Haber's people.

64.

Otto Hahn complied with an order to halt the shipment, but when Planck, the president of the KWS since 1930, returned from vacation, he ordered Otto Hahn to expedite the shipment.

65.

Telschow was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis, but was loyal to Otto Hahn, being one of his former students, and Otto Hahn welcomed his appointment.

66.

Hahn's chief assistant, Otto Erbacher, became the KWI for Chemistry's party steward.

67.

Jacob Papish helped Otto Hahn obtain several kilograms of the mineral.

68.

Meitner and Otto Hahn had not collaborated for many years, but Meitner was eager to investigate Fermi's results.

69.

Otto Hahn, initially, was not, but he changed his mind when Aristid von Grosse suggested that what Fermi had found was an isotope of protactinium.

70.

Otto Hahn considered the possibility that the reactions were from different isotopes of uranium; three were known: uranium-238, uranium-235 and uranium-234.

71.

Otto Hahn concluded that it must be another case of the nuclear isomerism that Hahn had discovered in protactinium.

72.

Otto Hahn carried only a little money, but before she left, Hahn gave her a diamond ring he had inherited from his mother.

73.

Otto Hahn initially suspected it to be radium, produced by splitting off two alpha-particles from the uranium nucleus, but chipping off two alpha particles via this process was unlikely.

74.

Otto Hahn reported to the HWA on the progress of his research.

75.

Otto Hahn's office was destroyed, along with his correspondence with Rutherford and other researchers, and many of his personal possessions.

76.

Otto Hahn was aware that uranium ore was fairly safe in the laboratory, although not so much for the 2,000 female slave labourers from Sachsenhausen concentration camp who mined it in Oranienburg.

77.

Otto Hahn certified that his work was important to the war effort, and that his wife Maria, who had a doctorate in physics, was required as his assistant.

78.

Otto Hahn mounted a lobbying campaign to get her released, but to no avail, and she was sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in January 1945.

79.

Otto Hahn survived the war, and was reunited with her daughters in England after the war.

80.

Otto Hahn was taken to Hechingen, where he joined Erich Bagge, Horst Korsching, Max von Laue, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker and Karl Wirtz.

81.

Otto Hahn was greatly disturbed by their reports of the Potsdam Conference, where German territory was ceded to Poland and the USSR.

82.

Otto Hahn noted that he was glad that they had not succeeded, and von Weizsacker suggested that they should claim that they had not wanted to.

83.

Otto Hahn's fellow interned scientists celebrated his award by giving speeches, making jokes, and composing songs.

84.

Otto Hahn had been nominated for the chemistry and the physics Nobel prizes many times even before the discovery of nuclear fission.

85.

The committee therefore recommended that Otto Hahn alone be given the chemistry prize.

86.

Otto Hahn therefore became the sole recipient of the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

87.

When Otto Hahn protested, Welsh reminded him that Germany had lost the war.

88.

Under the Nobel Foundation statutes, Otto Hahn had six months to deliver the Nobel Prize lecture, and until 1 October 1946 to cash the 150,000 Swedish krona cheque.

89.

Otto Hahn was repatriated from Farm Hall on 3 January 1946, but it soon became apparent that difficulties obtaining permission to travel from the British government meant that he would be unable to travel to Sweden before December 1946.

90.

Otto Hahn attended the year after he was awarded the prize.

91.

Otto Hahn gave 10,000 krona of his prize to Strassmann, who refused to use it.

92.

Otto Hahn served as president of the Max Planck Society until 1960, and succeeded in regaining the renown that had once been enjoyed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

93.

Otto Hahn saw the application of his scientific discoveries to such ends as a misuse, or even a crime.

94.

In 1956, Otto Hahn repeated his appeal with the signature of 52 of his Nobel colleagues from all parts of the world.

95.

Otto Hahn was instrumental in and one of the authors of the Gottingen Manifesto of 13 April 1957, in which, together with 17 leading German atomic scientists, he protested against a proposed nuclear arming of the West German armed forces.

96.

Otto Hahn's highly acclaimed speech was transmitted internationally by the Austrian radio, Osterreichischer Rundfunk.

97.

On 28 December 1957, Otto Hahn repeated his appeal in an English translation for the Bulgarian Radio in Sofia, which was broadcast in all Warsaw pact states.

98.

In 1959 Otto Hahn co-founded in Berlin the Federation of German Scientists, a non-governmental organization, which has been committed to the ideal of responsible science.

99.

Otto Hahn, it would seem, was even more than just an example of this twentieth-century conceptual evolution; he was a leader in the process.

100.

Otto 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.

101.

Otto Hahn gradually became weaker and died in Gottingen on 28 July 1968.

102.

Otto Hahn's behaviour was completely natural for him, but for the next generations he will serve as a model, regardless of whether one admires in the attitude of Otto Hahn his humane and scientific sense of responsibility or his personal courage.

103.

Otto Hahn's disarming frankness, unfailing kindness, good common sense, and impish humour will be remembered by his many friends all over the world.

104.

Otto Hahn became the honorary president of the Max Planck Society in 1962.

105.

Otto Hahn was an honorary fellow of University College London,.