World-famous Hungarian scientist who changed the world forever was born 113 years ago
Change language:
The world-famous Hungarian scientist, Ede Teller, known as Edward Teller in the US, was the inventor of the hydrogen bomb. He was born in 1908, on January 15, exactly 113 years ago. He became a legend during his lifetime and was considered the most influential scientist of the 20th century. Gorbachev would not want to shake hands with him, but many American presidents believed his word. In Hungary, we remember him mostly as a world-famous Hungarian scientist who reinforced the everything-was-invented-by-Hungarians image.
“They are already here among us, they call themselves Hungarians” – according to an anecdote, another world-famous Hungarian physicist, Leó Szilárd, gave this as an answer when they asked him why there is no evidence of life outside of Earth.
Born in Budapest to a Jewish family, Ede Teller was a member of this “extraterrestrial” group, which gained him a reputation in the United States for being very smart, but speaking an unintelligible, strange, incomprehensible language and coming from a faraway little country.
He owes his success to his mother tongue
According to Híradó, Teller later said that he owes his academic successes to the fact that his mother tongue was Hungarian. He thought that without it, he would have only become a high school teacher. Some people, as well as Ede Teller, thought that the Hungarian language often proved helpful in the development of logical thinking.
At a very young age, shortly before he was 18, he went to Germany in 1926, where he studied at several famous universities. After the Nazis came to power in 1934, he moved to England and then to the United States, where he lived until his death. He regularly returned to Hungary in the ‘30s, and in 1933, he married Augusta Schütz-Harkányi.
In 1937 he developed one of his most famous theories along with Herman Arthur Jahn.
It is known as the Jahn–Teller effect, which is an important mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking in molecular and solid-state systems which has far-reaching consequences in different fields.
Letter to the US President and sunscreen at the detonation of the first atomic bomb
In 1939, together with Leó Szilárd and other Hungarian scientists, he participated in the writing of the “Einstein-Szilárd letter”. In it, the scientists warned Franklin D. Roosevelt that experiments are being carried out by the Nazis that could lead to the creation of a destructive weapon capable of destroying an entire port. The letter was signed by Albert Einstein, but according to recollections, it was mainly written by Leó Szilárd and other Hungarian scientists. This letter ultimately led to the launch of the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the first atomic bomb. Many Hungarian scientists worked under the leadership of Robert Oppenheimer, including Ede Teller and Leó Szilárd.
“I did not want to turn away, but based on my calculations, I thought the explosion could be much bigger than expected. So, I put some sunscreen on,” Teller recalled about the day of the first experimental nuclear explosion.
In July 1945, when the first atomic bomb called the Gadget was detonated in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, the explosion caused a 12-kilometre mushroom cloud and vaporised the steel tower holding the bomb.
