Enrico Fermi (29 September 1901-28 November 1954) was an Italian physicist and the creater of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He was known as the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb" due to his instrumental role in helping the USA with its nuclear program; he was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his worked on induced radioactivity.
Biography[]
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy in 1901, and he graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1922. He began his research on physics in the 1920s, and he also began to delve into atomic sciences, creating "new elements" by bombarding thorium and uranium with slow neutrons; this discovery won him the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics, although they later turned out to be nuclear fission products. That same year, he emigrated to the United States due to Benito Mussolini's new racial laws, as Fermi's wife was Jewish. Fermi worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, founding the Chicago Pile-1 nuclear reactor - the world's first nuclear reactor - on 2 December 1942. He also built the Oak Ridge, Tennessee graphite reactor in 1943, and he worked on Edward Teller's "Super" bomb at Los Alamos. After the war's end, he strongly opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb on both moral and technical terms. He died of stomach cancer in 1954, and the synthetic element fermium is named for him.