Leó Szilárd

During his final years he was suffering from bladder cancer and was undergoing cobalt therapy. On May 30, 1964, the erudite scientist died of a heart attack while he was sleeping.

Leo Szilard was born on February 11, 1898 in a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary to Louis Spitz, an engineer and his wife Thekle Vidor. He was born with the name Leo Spitz but his surname was changed to Szilard, meaning solid when he was 2 years old. He was the eldest among the three children in his family.

Szilard studied at the ‘Realiskola School’ in Budapest and graduated at the age of 18 in 1916. At the same time he was awarded the ‘Eötvös Prize’ which was conferred upon students with exceptional knowledge in mathematics, in Hungary.

In the year 1916, he took admission in engineering at the ‘Palatine Joseph Technical University’ but only a year later he was called for army duty and became an officer. It was not till three years from first taking admission that he was able to resume his education.

In 1919, the ‘Palatine Joseph Technical University’, renamed ‘Budapest University of Technology’ did not want to have Leo as one of their students since he was Jewish and finding the situation untenable he made his way to Germany later that year.

Szilard joined the ‘Institute of Technology in Berlin-Charlottenburg’ in 1919 but he became disenchanted by engineering after a while and enrolled in the physics course at the ‘Friedrich Wilhelm University’.

After serving as an assistant at the ‘Institute of Theoretical Physics’ Szilard was appointed as a private lecturer at the same institute in 1927. During that time he produced a paper which laid the foundations for the study of information theory.

Although Leo Szilard had acquired German citizenship; he realised that he could not stay in the country for long due to the rise of Nazism and in the year 1933 he went to Vienna. A year later he joined the ‘St. Bartholomew’s Hospital’ in London as a member of the physics department.

Szilard was intrigued by Lord Rutherford’s claim that atomic energy wasn’t viable for the real world and wanted to prove his assertion wrong. He worked on separating isotopes in collaboration with T. A. Chambers and successfully demonstrated the ‘Szilard-Chambers effect’.

In the year 1937, he moved to the United States to teach at ‘Columbia University’ and after discussions with Eugene Wagner as well as Albert Einstein wrote a letter five years later to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarding the atomic bomb.

It was in the year 1942 that Szilard started with his experiments at the ‘University of Chicago’ in relation to the nuclear reactor in collaboration with Enrico Fermi and till the conclusion of the Second World War he continued to conduct research there. It became known as the famous ‘Manhattan Project’.

The erudite scientist made numerous contributions to the field of science but nonetheless his most important benefaction to the field of physics remained his design of nuclear reactor based on the principle of nuclear chain reaction. He was among the group of scientists who led the ‘Manhattan Project’ for manufacture of nuclear devices during the World War II.