OTTO HAHN (1879 - 1968)
"Who's the bad guy?"
Before the play...
Otto was born in Germany, the youngest son of a well-off glazier with three older brothers. At 15 he began to conduct chemistry experiments from the laundry of his family home, and went on to pursue a career in industrial chemistry despite his father’s hope he would become an architect. In 1897 he started his studies in Chemistry and Mineralogy at the University of Marburg.
After receiving his PhD, Otto spent a year in the military (compulsory at the time) before going on to work with his doctoral supervisor. Compared with Lise Meitner, who faced difficulties finding a job after graduation, Otto’s situation is revealing of the treatment of women in science at the time.
In 1904, Hahn travelled to England to work at UCL and improve his English skills. He expected this to be useful should he go on to work in industry. His plans to live a simple life in industrial chemistry, were foiled when, in 1905, he supposedly discovered a new radioactive element. Hahn became known as a radiochemist and found himself working in a wood-shop in Berlin looking for more elements. He received his first Nobel Prize nomination in 1907, and the same year met Lise Meitner.
The element he had discovered was later found to be an isotope of a pre-existing element, rather than a completely new one.
In 1911 Otto met an art student at a conference in Poland. Her name was Edith Junghans and she was studying at the Royal School of Art in Berlin. The two hit it off,and married two years later. They went on to have one son, Hanno, who worked as an art historian and architectural researcher until his early death in a car accident in 1960.
During the First World War Hahn was called back into the military, where he played a role in the unsuccessful attack on Flanders as well as the Christmas truce of 1914. From 1915-16 he was heavily involved with missions to perfect poisonous gas, and once sent to be a human guinea-pig for the testing of poisonous gases and gas masks. He was too ill to fight at the end of the war but remained heavily involved in the research into gas on behalf of the military.
In 1916, he also continued research in radiochemistry as he was posted to work in Berlin. In 1917 he discovered Protactinium with Lise, and each of them were nominated for a Nobel Prize. The pair continued to work together, along with Fritz Stassmann, getting closer and closer to the discovery of nuclear fission. Their work was interrupted when Hitler came to power. In July 1938, Hahn gave Meitner his mothers diamond ring to use as a bribe if necessary to escape over the border from Germany to the Netherlands.
While Meitner was away, Hahn wrote to her both as a friend and as a colleague, making enquiries about the work in radiochemistry he was undertaking. At one point he wrote “we realise that uranium can’t really break into barium,” but he would soon learn he was mistaken. While Hahn experimented, Meitner realised what he was doing. She coined the term nuclear fission.
During the play...
After the play...
Otto Hahn, 1954
A postage stamp from 1979, when Germany released a series dedicated to Nobel Prize winners
After the war, Hahn was taken to Farm Hall in England upon suspicion of working on the Nazi Atomic Weapon program. Every conversation the scientists had at Farm Hall was recorded, and Lawrence Badash (a historian) has suggested that Hahn considered taking his life upon hearing of the attack on Hiroshima in August 1945.
In November of that year he was informed he had received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of nuclear fission. He went on to form the Max Planck Institute (at what had once been the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute) and became an outspoken figure on the use of atomic science in warfare. He strongly believed atomic bombs were a misuse of science.
He died in 1968, and in his obituary was named “the founder of the atomic age.” Just as Lise was uncomfortable with her position as the “mother of the bomb,” Hahn’s name was eternally linked with events he felt deeply disturbed by.
Otto Hahn working with Lise Meitner in a lab, 1925