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Nuclear Fission

On December 17th, 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann identified Barium in the by-products of neutron bombardment of Uranium, suggesting the impossible: the atom had split, not just chipped. Hahn's research partner (Lise Meitner, at the time in Norway) advised her nephew Otto Frisch to confirm the experiment. They succeeded by January 13th, and with the help of a biologist friend, Frisch coined the term “nuclear fission”

Source: Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986

Otto Hahn Lise Meitner
Otto Hahn (left) and Lise Meitner (right)
License (left) CC BY-SA 3.0 NL. Public Domain (right)
Otto Frisch Nuclear fusion
Otto Frisch and a sketch of the first Nuclear Fission reaction
Public Domain

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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!