LETTER: Autograph letter signed.
Meitner, Lisa. Autograph letter signed, “Lise Meitner,” in German, to Otto Hah, May 16, [1917], on a government postcard, Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, Berlin-Dahlem.
Meitner writes to her longtime colleague, the chemist Otto Hahn:
Dear Mr. Hahn...I have studied the literature in question for about two hours, apparently there are no monographs on tantalum...I have found a lengthy, detailed piece by Ruff and Schiller in the journal for anorganic chemistry from 1911, which probably contains everything you are looking for....
She cites the title of the article, “On Tantalum and Niobiumpentafluoride and the Synthesis of Pure Tantalic and Niobic Acid,” and continues,
It contains in its third part the synthesis of tantalum from tantalide and columbide, and all procedures then known for the separation from titanic acid are described and discussed. Maybe it is easiest to ask Prof. Ruff for a reprint....
In 1918, two groups of scientists, led by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner of Germany and Frederick Soddy and John Cranston of Great Britain, independently discovered protactinium isotope #231. This letter likely refers to the research leading to Meitner and Hahn’s discovery.
Meitner was part of the team which discovered nuclear fission and for which Otto Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize in chemistry. It has been argued that the Nobel Committee’s bias against women caused them to disregard Meitner’s key contribution to the theory of nuclear fission. Meitner criticized Hahn, Heisenberg and other colleagues for working for the Nazi regime instead of criticizing its horrors. As a Jew converted to Christianity, she had to flee Germany in 1938 for Sweden where she eventually became a citizen. In 1939, working with her nephew Otto Frisch who also escaped Nazi Germany and fled to Sweden, both understood that uranium atoms split in the process Frisch named as nuclear fission. She received many scientific honors including the rare honor of giving her name to a new element Element 109, meitnerium.
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