Edward Teller

When he was a young student, he met with a car accident, which caused a severe injury on his right foot. The accident resulted in a prosthetic foot and he had a lifelong limp.

In February, 1934 he married Augusta Maria ‘Mici’ Harkanyi.

He died on September 9, 2003 at the age of 95, due to a stroke at his campus home in Stanford, California.

Edward Teller was born in Budapest, Hungary to Jewish parents, Max Teller, who was an attorney and Ilona Teller, a pianist.

In 1928, he graduated from the University of Karlsruhe with a BS degree in Chemical Engineering. He later obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Leipzig.

In 1935, he moved to the United States of America and worked as physics Professor at the George Washington University, where he taught until 1941.

In 1941, he became a citizen of the United States of America, before which he worked as a theoretical physicist. However, after he earned a U.S. citizenship, he became interested in the study of nuclear energy.

In 1942, he was invited to be a part of seminar on the Manhattan Project, a project that developed the first atomic bomb. During the session, he gave ideas about producing a fission weapon.

In 1943, he began to work at the Los Alamos Laboratory, New Mexico, where he was part of the Theoretical Physics department. Here, he began to give his ideas on fission weapons.

In 1946, he participated in a conference on hydrogen bomb design and the same year he quit his job at the Los Alamos Laboratory and began to work as a Professor at the University of Chicago.

In 1949, after the Soviet Union first detonated an atomic bomb, the then President Truman proposed the development program for the hydrogen bomb. The following year, he went to the Los Alamos Laboratory to work on the project.

He invented the ‘Teller-Ulam design’, which was a first workable design of a hydrogen bomb. This design was used to create the ‘Ivy Mike’, the thermonuclear weapon that was successfully tested in 1952.