Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch, 1939

MEITNER, Lise (1878-1968) and Otto Robert FRISCH (1904-1979). “Products of the Fission of the Uranium Nucleus”. Offprint from: Nature, Vol. 143. [London: Macmillan], 1939.

First edition, rare offprint issue, of the second Meitner-Frisch paper on nuclear fission. It is an extension of their “Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: A New Type of Nuclear Reaction” (see preceding lot), published a few weeks earlier. These two papers established theoretically and experimentally the fact of nuclear fission, the publication of which led directly to the atomic bomb. No copies listed in auction records (RBH).

In 1938, at the suggestion of Lise Meitner, Hahn and Strassmann bombarded uranium with neutrons in the expectation of producing “transuranium” elements. They discovered barium isotopes among the decay products produced by the bombarded nuclei. At a loss to interpret this, the two men communicated their result by letter to Hahn’s former co-worker Lise Meitner, who had earlier fled to Stockholm to escape Nazi persecution. Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch theorized that the uranium nucleus breaks up into two smaller nuclei through the mutual repulsion of the many protons in the uranium nucleus, which makes it behave like a droplet of water in which the surface tension has been reduced. By taking the difference between the mass of the original nucleus and the slightly smaller total mass of the two fragment nuclei, and using Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence (e = mc2), Meitner calculated the large amount of energy (equal to 200 million electron volts) that would be released during the splitting process, which she and Frisch named “fission”. It is now agreed that Meitner should have been the recipient, or at the least joint recipient, of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission that was awarded to Hahn.

Octavo (213 x 140mm). Three pages on bifolium, unbound as issued.