On the Products of the Fission of Uranium and Thorium Under Neutron Bombardment.
NUCLEAR FISSION
Meitner, Lisa and O.R. Frisch. On the Products of the Fission of Uranium and Thorium Under Neutron Bombardment. [Offprint from:] Det Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. Mathematisk-fysiske Meddelelser. Volume 17, No. 5. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1939.
Slim 8vo.; 14 pages; partially unopened; printed wrappers; stapled.
Uncommon offprint of the paper that revealed the discovery of nuclear fission by Meitner and others.
When the neutron was discovered in the early 1930s a scientific race began to create elements heavier than uranium, which has a nucleus composed of 92 protons. Lise Meitner, a researcher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the University of Berlin, was studying this question when she was forced to flee Germany, leaving her collaborators Otto Hahn and Fritz Straussman to continue their planned series of experiments. The puzzling data that they obtained from bombarding uranium with neutrons was transmitted to Meitner, who, together with her nephew Otto Frisch, confirmed the results and “found the true explanation of these phenomena. The interpolation of a neutron into the nucleus of a uranium atom caused it to divide into two parts and to release energy amounting to about 200,000,000 electron volts. This process bore such a close similarity to the division of living cells that Frisch suggested the use of the term ‘fission’ to describe it” (PMM 422). Meitner also realised that Einstein’s equation E = mc2 explained the massive release of energy as the conversion of matter to energy, and anticipated the development of massive chain reactions.
Meitner was unable to publish jointly with Hahn and Straussman, whose paper appeared in Naturwissenschaften in December 1938, and instead she and Frisch published their groundbreaking analysis of the data in Nature and in the proceedings of the Danish Academy of Sciences the following year.
A superb copy of this uncommon offprint.
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