Otto Hahn

In 1913, he married Edith Junghans, an art student at the Royal Academy of Art in Berlin. Nine years later, he and his wife had their only child, Hanno.

He died on July 28, 1968, in Göttingen, Germany, from an accidental fall.

There have been numerous times when scientific bodies have tried, unsuccessfully, to name new elements after him. (This is despite a longstanding tradition that it is the right of the elements' discoverers to name them.)

Otto Hahn was the youngest son of Heinrich Hahn, a glazier and businessman, and Charlotte Giese, born in Frankfurt Germany on March 8, 1879. He started conducting chemistry experiments at the age of 15 in the family laundry room, and two years later he announced his intention to become a chemist.

Starting in 1897, he studied at the ‘University of Marburg’, where he received a doctorate, working in chemistry and mineralogy. He also studied at the ‘University of Munich’ under Adolf von Baeyer.

He took a position in radiochemistry at the ‘University College London’ in 1904 under Sir William Ramsay, the discoverer of inert gasses. Two years later, he went back to Germany to work at the ‘University of Berlin’ with Emil Fischer, who gave Hahn his own laboratory, where he discovered substances including radium-228 (mesothorium I) and thorium-230 (ionium).

He started teaching at the ‘University of Berlin’ in 1907 and met Lise Meitner, a physicist from Austria, with whom he would collaborate throughout his career. During the same time Hahn was considered one of the leading radiochemists in the world, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize by Adolf von Baeyer.

He then worked on explaining the phenomenon of radioactive recoil discovered by Canadian physicist Harriet Brooks.

In 1924, he was elected to full membership in the ‘Prussian Academy of Sciences’ after his name was nominated by Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Fritz Haber, Wilhelm Schlenk, and Max von Laue. Later that decade, and for nearly twenty years afterward, he was the director of the prestigious ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’.

On December 16 and 17 of 1938, Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann conducted experiments which created nuclear fission. The phenomenon was later explained by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch.

Hahn’s collaboration with Lise Meitner resulted in the discovery of a new element named protactinium. The duo received several nominations for Nobel Prize in Chemistry throughout the 1920s. Later, the ‘International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’ (IUPAC) confirmed him and Meitner as the discoverers.

In 1938, he made his greatest discovery: nuclear fission. This discovery would later make atomic bombs possible, and although he was not directly involved with their development, he came to feel guilty about his research's contribution to these weapons.