Otto Hahn
MAR 08, 2016
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031169
On this day in 1879, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Otto Hahn was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 1938, he and Fritz Strassman found evidence of the element barium (atomic number 56) in samples of uranium (atomic number 92) that had been bombarded with neutrons. Hahn shared his results with colleague Lise Meitner, who had recently fled Nazi Germany and moved to Sweden. Meitner and her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch, studied the process and proposed the term nuclear fission.
Date in History: 8 March 1879
© 2016 American Institute of Physics
