When Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 2 August 1939 apprising him of the threat that an atomic bomb might be built, he naturally drew attention to work by Leo Szilard, the first person to realize that it might be possible to build the bomb, and Enrico Fermi, who would build the world’s first reactor. But the operative second paragraph gives primacy not to them but rather to a French physicist, Frédéric Joliot, a name largely lost to the general US reader.
“In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America—that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated.”
Who was Joliot, and how...
