Figure 1.-- This family snapshot shows Enrico Fermi as a boy (second from left) growing up in Rome. His brother Giulio (who died in childhood) is third from right. Their older sister Maria stands on the far right. The photograph looks to have been taken about 1911.

Italian physicist Enrico Fermi played a key role in the Manhattan Project, both in getting President Roosevlt's support and in the physics involved. One colleague described Fermi as, "one of the leading lights of he nuclear revolution that came bout in physics." Enrico was hooked on science and mchanics as a boy. He njoyedassembling electric motors for fun. It soon becane apparent tht his field would be physics. He first encountered physics while browsing an open air book market. It was there he spied a thick 900-page volume, Elenmentorum physicae mathematicae (1840). It was written in Latin and covered the phsics of acoustuics, astronomy, optics, and mathematics. So while other boys were playing ball and other ganmes in the streers of Rome, Enrico diveted himself by building gyroscopes anbd devising formulas measuring Earth's gravitational acceleration. He was an outstanding student and entered university at age 17 years, enrolling in the Scuola Normale Superiore. This was a university for especially gifted students in Pisa. He concentrated on advanced mathematica and and physuics, demonstrating an astonishing aptitude for both. He published hiss first paper duting his second year. Fermi was the first scholar to explore the practical application of Enstein famous equation--E=mc2. And this meant how to harness nuclear energy. After graduation, Fermi won a prestigious position at he Sapienza University of Rome. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Italy. Politics then entered Fermi's life. Fascist Dictator Benito Mussolini under pressure from Hitler, issued anti-Semitic laws (1938). Fermi wasn't Jewish, but his wife Laura was and because of that their children were half Jews, also affected by the laws. To protect her and the children, he took his family to America. In that same year he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on radioactive elements which provided an excuse for leving Italy. He joined the faculty of Columbia University where he worked with uranium. The next year, German scientists cracked the atom and Hitler launched World War II. Fermi and other refugee scientst of course understood the implications. No one in the U.S. Government understood and most Americans were intent on staying out of the War, not on building a Buck Rogers weapon. Fermi even before punlication of the Hann-Strraussman paper corroberated the the German results. Fermi and other refugee scientists knew they did not have the clout to get the Washington neauracravy to take notice. Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd was given the job of getting pacifist scirntist Albert Einstein to lend his name to the effort. Szilárd write a letter to President Rooevelt and Einstein signed it. Einstein was the one scientist that could impress President Roosevelt. And the President was the ne man that could order the military to work on a secret weapon in which hey were not inerested. And Adolf Hitler was persionally respnsible for driving Einstein, Fermi, Szilárd, and others to America where they would influence the President andhelp build a bomb. Fermi would be involved in the earliest stage of the Manhattan Project. Fermi and Szilárd built the world's first nuclear reactor in a squash court at the University of Chicago. They generated the first self-sustaining nuclear chan reaction (December 2, 1942). Thinking that the Germans were ahead in the race for the bomb, the United States then launched the massive effort to build an atomic bomb.

Created: 7:43 AM 1/14/2019
Last updated: 7:43 AM 1/14/2019