Fermi Dies: Architect of the Nuclear Age Passes

Enrico Fermi left Italy on the night he received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1938, collecting his family and flying to New York instead of returning home. Mussolini's racial laws had targeted his Jewish wife Laura, and the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm provided the cover for an escape he had been planning for months. Born in Rome in 1901, Fermi had demonstrated extraordinary mathematical ability as a child and was appointed professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome at twenty-four, the youngest full professor in Italy. His research on slow neutrons in the mid-1930s, demonstrating that neutrons moderated by paraffin or water were more effective at inducing nuclear reactions, earned him the Nobel Prize and, more consequentially, laid the theoretical groundwork for nuclear fission. In Chicago on December 2, 1942, under the squash courts at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, Fermi achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. He used 45,000 graphite bricks, six tons of uranium metal, and fifty tons of uranium oxide, stacked into a pile that his team carefully assembled over weeks. The pile went critical at 3:25 in the afternoon. Arthur Compton called James Conant to report the success: "The Italian navigator has landed in the New World." Then Fermi went to lunch. The reactor operated for twenty-eight minutes before being shut down. The achievement proved that a nuclear chain reaction could be controlled, making both nuclear power and nuclear weapons possible. Fermi worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and was present for the Trinity test. He died of stomach cancer on November 28, 1954, at fifty-three, likely caused by radiation exposure during his years of experimental work.