In January 1939 the news of the discovery of nuclear fission burst in America, sending physicists into their laboratories to try to confirm the startling new discovery. Some aspects of the story of how this news reached America are well known. Others, however, are not; they have remained hidden in private correspondence and other unpublished documents. By examining these materials in conjunction with the published literature, one can reconstruct the circumstances that converged to produce this historic event.
REFERENCES
1.
2.
Bohr Scientific Correspondence, Archives for the History of Quantum Physics, with repositories at the Bohr Institute, Copenhagen; the American Philosophical Society, Philadelpia; the AIP Center for History of Physics, New York; the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; the University of California, Berkeley; the Science Museum, London; the Deutsches Museum, Munich; and the Accademia dei XL, Rome. No relevant letters between Bohr and Veblen, however, are extant in the Bohr Scientific Correspondence. That Veblen arranged Bohr's appointment is evident from other correspondence.
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Meitner Papers, Churchill College Archives, University of Cambridge. Parts of this correspondence are reprinted in F. Krafft, Im Schatten der Sensation: Leben und Wirken von Fritz Strassmann, Verlag‐Chemie, Deerfield Beach, Fla. (1981).
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L. Rosenfeld, “Nuclear Reminiscences,” in F. Reines, ed., Cosmology, Fusion and Other Matters: George Gamow Memorial Volume, Colorado Assoc. U.P., Boulder (1972).
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R. H. Stuewer, ed., Nuclear Physics in Retrospect: Proceedings of a Symposium on the 1930s, Univ. Minnesota P., Minneapolis (1979).
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H. L. Anderson, Bull. Atomic Sci., September 1974, p. 57.
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C. F.
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1985
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