Enrico Fermi, 1940s
Enrico Fermi, 1940s

Department of Energy-Office of Public Affairs, restored by Yann · Public domain · Source

Person1901 – 1954

Enrico Fermi

Italian-born physicist who, after receiving the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics, emigrated to the US and achieved the first chain reaction with the world’s first reactor in Chicago in 1942

Where they went

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2 related events

  1. 1

    On 2 December 1942, in the world’s first reactor — graphite and uranium stacked by Enrico Fermi beneath the stands of the University of Chicago’s football field — a man-made nuclear chain reaction sustained itself for the first time.

  2. 2

    In 1943 a secret laboratory to design the atomic bomb was founded on a remote mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oppenheimer, its director, gathered leading scientists including Fermi and Bohr.

People who appear alongside

  • Leo Szilard1898 – 1964

    Hungarian-born physicist who first conceived the nuclear chain reaction and persuaded Einstein to write to Roosevelt warning of the atomic bomb

  • J. Robert Oppenheimer1904 – 1967

    American physicist who directed the Los Alamos laboratory and led the building of the atomic bomb — the "father of the atomic bomb" — and after the war opposed the hydrogen bomb

  • Leslie Groves1896 – 1970

    US Army general who oversaw the building of the Pentagon and from 1942 commanded the whole Manhattan Project

Themes this person appears in

  • The Birth of the Atomic Bomb1938 – 1949

    From the discovery of fission to the first Soviet bomb — Einstein’s letter, the Manhattan Project, the Trinity test, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the dawn of the nuclear age