Leo Szilard
On September 12th, 1933, while casually walking the streets of London, Leo Szilard imagined a nuclear chain reaction for the first time. He had just read about Lord Rutherford's lecture where it was said that "anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atom was talking moonshine". Lord Rutherford was wrong, and Szilard's chain reaction was the basis of the Nuclear era.
Source: Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!