Enrico Fermi Born: Architect of the Nuclear Age
Fermi built the world's first nuclear reactor under the stands of an abandoned football stadium in Chicago. Squash courts, actually. In December 1942, with no remote controls, only cadmium-coated rods and the word 'now' from Fermi, the pile went critical. The experiment was called Chicago Pile-1. Nobody told the city. He'd left Italy in 1938 when his wife, who was Jewish, faced new racial laws — used the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm as a one-way exit. At Los Alamos he calculated bomb yields on a slide rule. His students called him The Pope because his pronouncements were always right. He was 53 when he died of stomach cancer. The element fermium is named after him.
September 29, 1901
125 years ago
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