Leo Szilard

The influenza probably saved his life. Szilard had joined an Austro-Hungarian mountain artillery regiment and fell ill in September 1918, days before it went to the front, where it was nearly annihilated. He was born Leo Spitz in Budapest on February 11, 1898, into a middle-class Jewish family that Magyarized the surname in 1900, and he took Hungary's national mathematics prize in 1916. Nationalist students blocked him from re-enrolling at the technical university because he was a Jew, so at Christmas 1919 he left for Berlin. There he gave up engineering for physics, wrote a thermodynamics dissertation that Einstein praised, and filed patents on the electron microscope, the linear accelerator and the cyclotron without building any of them. Other men collected the Nobel Prizes.

Szilard left Berlin for London weeks after Hitler took power in January 1933. On September 12 he read Rutherford in The Times calling atomic power moonshine, and crossing Southampton Row at Russell Square he saw what Rutherford had ruled out: a neutron absorbed by a nucleus that then releases more, sustaining itself. He patented the idea in 1934 and assigned it to the British Admiralty to keep it unpublished. In 1939 he drafted the letter Einstein signed warning Roosevelt about German atomic research, then spent the war inside the program it started, sharing the reactor patent with Enrico Fermi.

He was also the first person to try to stop it. On July 17, 1945, Szilard circulated a petition asking Truman to publish the surrender terms and give Japan the chance to accept them before any atomic bomb was used. Seventy scientists at the Chicago laboratory signed. Oppenheimer kept it out of Los Alamos, James Byrnes had already heard the argument and dismissed it, and the petition never cleared the chain of command. It stayed classified until 1961. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6. Szilard was nobody's easy colleague. He lived out of two packed suitcases in hotel rooms, asked the questions the project found embarrassing, and fought with Leslie Groves, who in October 1942 drafted an order to have him interned as an enemy alien. Henry Stimson refused to sign it. Szilard was naturalized in March 1943.

Then he left physics. At Chicago he and Aaron Novick built the chemostat and identified feedback inhibition, and he spent his last years as a fellow of the Salk Institute, which he had helped create. The Voice of the Dolphins, a 1961 book of short stories, argued his case about the bomb in fiction, and in 1962 he founded the Council for a Livable World to lobby Congress on arms control. Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1960, he turned down the radical surgery his surgeon recommended and designed his own cobalt-60 regimen at Memorial Sloan Kettering, taking a second and heavier course in 1962. The cancer never returned. A heart attack killed him in his sleep on May 30, 1964.

Leo Szilard's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Improvements in or relating to the transmutation of chemical elements patent
  The chain reaction patent, filed June 28, 1934 and granted March 30, 1936 — assigned to the British Admiralty and not published until 1949 1934
• Einstein refrigerator patent
  US patent 1,781,541, with Albert Einstein — a refrigerator with no moving parts 1930
• The Szilard-Chalmers effect discovery
  With Thomas A. Chalmers at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London — a method of isotope separation later used to prepare medical isotopes 1934
• Neutronic reactor patent
  US patent 2,708,656, with Enrico Fermi — filed December 19, 1944 and issued May 17, 1955 1944
• A Petition to the President of the United States other
  Drafted and circulated in July 1945 and signed by 70 Manhattan Project scientists in Chicago 1945
• The Voice of the Dolphins book
  Short stories on the Cold War and his own part in the bomb 1961

• February 11, 1898 aged 0 Born Leo Spitz in Budapest His parents were Lajos Spitz, a civil engineer, and Tekla Vidor. The family changed the surname to Szilard in 1900.
• September 1918 aged 20 Falls ill with influenza before his regiment reaches the front The regiment was nearly wiped out. He was discharged honorably after the Armistice in November.
• December 25, 1919 aged 21 Leaves Hungary for Berlin Nationalist students had blocked his return to the Budapest technical university because he was a Jew.
• September 12, 1933 aged 35 Conceives the nuclear chain reaction crossing a London street He had read that morning that Rutherford called atomic power moonshine. The crossing was Southampton Row at Russell Square.
• June 28, 1934 aged 36 Files the chain reaction patent in Britain He assigned it to the Admiralty to keep it secret. It was granted in 1936 and published only in 1949.
• August 2, 1939 aged 41 Einstein signs the letter Szilard drafted for Roosevelt Alexander Sachs delivered it to the president on October 11, 1939.
• December 2, 1942 aged 44 Stands with Fermi at the first self-sustaining chain reaction Chicago Pile-1, under the viewing stands at Stagg Field. He shook Fermi's hand.
• July 17, 1945 aged 47 Circulates the petition asking Truman not to use the bomb without warning Seventy scientists signed. It never cleared the chain of command and stayed classified until 1961.
• May 30, 1964 aged 66 Dies in his sleep of a heart attack in La Jolla He had moved to San Diego in February and become a resident fellow of the Salk Institute on April 1.

• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. drafted the letter he signed
• Enrico Fermi 1901–1954
  Italian-American physicist who built the first nuclear reactor and won the Nobel Prize in Physics. co-patented the nuclear reactor with
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. blocked the petition at Los Alamos
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. petitioned
• Jonas Salk 1914–1995
  Medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine. helped found the Salk Institute with
• Harold Urey 1893–1981
  Discovered deuterium and founded cosmochemistry fellow contributor to One World or None