Albert Einstein’s Hungarian student who helped creating the atomic bomb: Szilárd Leó

Szilárd Leó (or Leo Szilard) was an American physicist and inventor of Hungarian origin. He was Albert Einstein’s student and collaborator, who played an instrumental role in creating the atomic bomb. An “intellectual bumblebee”, a “pushy Jewish busybody”, “a parasite living on the brains of others” – these are the words of his colleagues. But who was the Hungarian man who took part in the Manhattan project so actively and was still left out of its official history?

Early Life

Leó Szilárd was born on February 11, 1898, in Budapest, Hungary (back in the day it was Austro-Hungary). As a child, he was already specific, for example, if he was asked to close the windows because it was cold outside, he always made the point that closing the window would not raise the temperature outside. Nevertheless, it was already seen that he was cleverer than most of his peers. His father was a civil engineer, and Szilárd followed his footsteps in 1916 and started his studies as an engineering student at a technical university in Budapest. After a year only, he joined the Austro-Hungarian army. While the war was still raging in 1917, he escaped the frontlines due to an illness. After the war, he returned to school first in Budapest, then in 1920, he transferred to the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, Germany. But soon he switched schools again, having gotten bored with engineering, and started attending Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where he studied physics. Here Albert Einstein, Max Plank and Max von Laue (both Nobel prize winners in physics) were his professors.

Szilárd Leó Collaboration with Einstein

Szilárd earned his Ph.D. in physics at University of Berlin in 1922. He wrote his thesis with von Laue as his adviser, which explored thermodynamics, or the study of the physics of heat. Soon he started working as a research assistant to von Laue at the Institute for Theoretical Physics for several years. He also collaborated with Einstein between 1926 and 1930 on a type of home refrigerator, later known as the Einstein refrigerator or the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator. They were motivated by contemporary newspaper reports of a Berlin family who had been killed when a seal in their refrigerator failed and leaked toxic fumes. They worked out a device with no moving parts.

He left Germany in 1933, due to the rise of the Nazi Party. He went to Vienna for some time and then arrived in London in 1934, where he worked at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Here he conducted experiments on chain reactions. Though he did not find the chain reaction he was searching for, he did find a way to separate isotopes, or special parts, of certain elements.