Otto Hahn began nuclear chemistry in a Berlin basement woodworking shop
When Otto Hahn came back to Berlin in 1906, the only room offered to the young radiochemist was a disused carpentry workshop under the Chemical Institute. He built electroscopes from brass and amber, charged them by rubbing rubber rods on his suit sleeves, and within months had identified several new radioactive substances.
Hahn was born in Frankfurt on 8 March 1879, the youngest son of a prosperous glazier, and did his first chemistry experiments at fifteen in the family laundry room. His father hoped for an architect. After a Marburg doctorate in 1901 on an organic compound, Hahn aimed at industry, but the dye firm Kalle wanted recruits who had lived abroad and spoke another language. So in 1904 he went to London to work with William Ramsay, discoverer of the noble gases, on the very young science of radioactivity.
Processing radium salts in early 1905, he found radiothorium, then believed to be a new element; it was really a form of thorium, and the word isotope only arrived in 1913 with Frederick Soddy. Ramsay announced it to the Royal Society and urged Hahn toward academic radiochemistry. Hahn first spent a year with Ernest Rutherford at McGill in Montreal, where a sceptical Bertram Boltwood joked that radiothorium was thorium X mixed with stupidity. Hahn went on to detect thorium C, which lasts only about 300 nanoseconds, plus radioactinium.
Back in Berlin he bought two milligrams of radium at 100 marks each and got thorium free from a local manufacturer. Mesothorium I, one of his finds, later served in radiation therapy as well as radium did at half the cost. Many organic chemists sneered that his work was not real chemistry, and Emil Fischer initially insisted he could smell any substance that existed, but gave way.
From 1912 Hahn ran a radioactivity department at the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry alongside Lise Meitner, who isolated the longest-lived protactinium isotope in 1918. He served in Fritz Haber's gas warfare unit during the First World War. Working with Fritz Strassmann and Meitner, Hahn uncovered nuclear fission in 1938, the same year Meitner had to flee Nazi Germany; Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. After six months held by the Allies at Farm Hall, he led the new Max Planck Society from 1948 to 1960. He died in 1968.
Source: Otto Hahn
