Otto Frisch

Austrian-British Physicist, famous for work on first atomic bomb

[ Born: 1904 / Vienna, Austria ]

[ Died: 1979 / Cambridge, England ]

---

• 1939 - Along with Lise Meitner, explained the physical processes behind Hahn and Strassman’s discovery of nuclear fission of the uranium atom by bombardment of slow neutrons.
• Drafted the “Frisch-Peierls Memorandum” with Rudolph Peierls in 1939, outlining how an atomic bomb could be made and what its effects would be.
• His British citizenship was accelerated in 1943 so that he could work on the Manhattan Project as part of the British delegation.
• In 1943 calculated the exact amount of Uranium-235 required to fire the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

Trivia - Frisch, an Austrian-Jew was dismissed from the Universities of Berlin and Hamburg due to German racial laws in 1933, the same year that Hitler rose to become chancellor of Germany. Frisch subsequently moved to London.

Image from aip.org