Fritz Strassmann
| Fritz Strassmann | |
|---|---|
| Born | Friedrich Wilhelm Strassmann 22 February 1902 Boppard, German Empire |
| Died | 22 April 1980 (aged 78) Mainz, West Germany |
| Nationality | Germany |
| Fields | Physicist, Chemist |
| Known for | Nuclear fission |
| Notable awards | Enrico Fermi Award (1966) |
Friedrich Wilhelm "Fritz" Strassmann (German: Straßmann; 22 February 1902 – 22 April 1980) was a German chemist who, with Otto Hahn in early 1939, identified barium in the residue after bombarding uranium with neutrons, results which, when confirmed, demonstrated the previously unknown phenomenon of nuclear fission.
Born in Boppard, he began his chemistry studies in 1920 at the Technical University of Hannover and earned his Ph.D. in 1929. He did his Ph.D. work on the solubility of iodine gaseous carbonic acid. Strassmann started an academic career because the employment situation in the chemical industry was much worse than at the universities at that time.
Strassmann worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem, from 1929.
In 1933 he resigned from the Society of German Chemists when it became part of a Nazi-controlled public corporation. He was blacklisted. Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner found an assistantship for him at half pay. Strassmann considered himself fortunate, for "despite my affinity for chemistry, I value my personal freedom so highly that to preserve it I would break stones for a living." During the war he and his wife Maria Heckter Strassmann concealed a Jewish friend in their apartment for months, putting themselves and their three-year-old son at risk.
Strassmann’s expertise in analytical chemistry was employed by Hahn and Meitner in their investigations of the products of uranium bombarded by neutrons. In December 1938, Hahn and Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. In 1944, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission.
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