Physicist pioneered nuclear reaction

Web posted Thursday, November 2, 2000

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By Brandon Haddock
Staff Writer

On Dec. 2, 1942, on a squash court beneath the stands of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, Enrico Fermi laid the cornerstone for the foundation of the atomic age.

At age 41, by the time he presided over the first controlled nuclear ``chain reaction,'' the Italian-born physicist already had enjoyed a prodigious career. It was Dr. Fermi who first documented nuclear fission, or the splitting of the atom, during an experiment in the mid-1930s, although no one realized what he had done at the time.

Enrico Fermi

The experiment earned Dr. Fermi the Nobel Prize for physics in 1938. It also created the possibility of a devastating atomic weapon, which is how the scientist came to spend 1942 under the west stand of Stagg Field.

Similarly to other leading physicists of the time, Dr. Fermi knew firsthand the dangers of the spread of fascism in Europe. He used his trip to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize as an opportunity to free his family from the reign of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The family settled in the United States, where Dr. Fermi worked as a professor at Columbia University.

After his arrival in the United States, Dr. Fermi became a member of a group of scientists who pushed for the nation to develop an atomic bomb, out of fear that Germany might come into sole possession of such knowledge and power.

The physicist was one of several scientists who drafted a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The letter - which bore the signature of Albert Einstein among others - persuaded the president to take action, and by 1942, Dr. Fermi found himself at the University of Chicago, attempting to harness the power of the atom for The Manhattan Project, the nation's supersecret effort to develop the atomic bomb.

Dr. Fermi's task was to manufacture and sustain a chain reaction. He oversaw the design and construction of the world's earliest nuclear reactor, a contraption he dubbed the ``atomic pile.'' On Dec. 2, he achieved his goal, unleashing not only the power of the atomic bomb but also the principles that led to peacetime uses of atomic energy, such as power generation and medical research.

Dr. Fermi pursued such uses at his Institute for Nuclear Studies - now called the Enrico Fermi Institute - at the University of Chicago. He helped design a ground-breaking, atom-smashing device called the synchrocyclotron, part of which remains in use at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Dr. Fermi died in 1954, at age 53, of stomach cancer. Besides the national laboratory, also known as Fermilab, the physicist's name appears on an international award for physics, and on element number 100 - Fermium.

Brandon Haddock

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