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Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb
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Edward Teller was a Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist who participated in the production of the first atomic bomb in 1945 and whose research led to the development of the hydrogen bomb, the world’s first thermonuclear weapon.
He was born on the 15th of January in 1908 in Hungary (Austria-Hungary at that time) into a Jewish family but later he became an agnostic. He was a late talker, like Einstein or Feynman, but as soon as he started talking, he spoke in full long sentences. As a child, he also became interested in numbers,
he would calculate large numbers in his head for fun.
He started studying at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics but left Hungary in 1926, partly because of the discriminatory numerus clausus rule under Miklós Horthy’s regime. Teller studied chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, where his professors were amazed by his clever and original ideas. Teller spent the holidays in Hungary, with his friends. They loved hiking in the hills of Buda. Once he suffered a serious accident party because of this hobby: he was going to the train station in Munich, planning to go to one of these excursions. His thoughts must have wandered away because it was too late when he realised that he had to get off: he jumped off the tram when it was already moving. He lost balance and the tram pushed him. Teller rolled away on the ground, and he saw with a surprise that his right boot was in front of him, torn. His first thought was that he would be unable to go hiking like this… only then did he realise that part of his right foot was in that boot. The accident required him to wear a prosthetic foot, leaving him with a lifelong limp.
Teller received his PhD in physics under Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. According to the anecdote, his teacher told him to write his dissertation on the calculations he had so far instead of calculating further because his noisy calculator did not let the doctor sleep, whose room was right below Teller’s.
