Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  Detesting violence, Szilard even avoided strenuous exercise whenever he could. He never learned to ride a bicycle or to swim, and in school he shunned most sports. He agreed to sprint in gym class but refused to join the long-distance run, the high jump, the long jump, and exercises on the bar and horse. Instead, he sat by the sidelines and read a book. As he would later discover, however, there was more to sport than exercise. “One of the favorite sports of the class . . . was playing soccer,” Szilard recalled later.

  I was not a good soccer player, but because I was liked there was always a rivalry between the two teams: On whose side would I be? I was sort of a mascot. They discovered early that I was, from an objective point of view, no asset to the team, and it didn’t take them long to discover that I could do least damage by being the goalkeeper. So up to the age of 15, when I finally refused, I played every soccer game of the class on one or the other side, very often on the losing side. In thinking back, I have a feeling of gratitude for the affection which went so far that my classmates did not mind occasionally losing a game for the sake of having me on their team.4

  Off the field, Szilard was more remote from his classmates, seldom paid attention to their adolescent musings or revealed his own emotions, and only talked easily when discussing their studies.5 Some social graces were expected of middle-class boys in the Szilard family’s circle, so when Leo was about eleven years old, he and his friends were sent to dancing school. Leo’s movements on the dance floor were almost graceful, Bela recalled, but appeared awkward; he seemed propelled by duty rather than enthusiasm. Leo was polite but aloof to the young girls, yet revealed no enjoyment when holding them in his arms.

  Leo seemed fond of girls his own age, or at least he liked the idea of being around them. They found him handsome and lively but also shy and inhibited, sensing that his mind and his energies were focused elsewhere. As emotions of friendship and romance stirred in his heart, Leo masked them with a forced but genteel formality. His humor was sly and curt, inspired by discomfort over what to talk about and often edged with selfdefensive mockery.6

  A favorite place for the Szilard and Scheiber cousins to meet and to play croquet and other lawn games was the Eppinger family’s garden just across the Fasor.7 Alice Eppinger was a close friend of Rose Szilard’s, and this tie brought Leo and Alice together. Gradually, Leo befriended Alice, enjoyed her company, and began to relax when around her. More gradually, he found a way to be affectionate. Alice was also a brilliant student, especially at math, and as the months passed, she became Leo’s first female friend. His first love. And, for years, a loving friend.

  As his sister’s closest companion, however, Alice evolved a complex relationship with Leo, one that took years to play out. When Leo and Alice were together, she sometimes eyed other young women jealously. Leo only laughed at this, but her fears seemed to come true once he began to notice Alice’s friend, Leona (Lola) Steiner. “You should marry Lola,” Alice insisted, trying to provoke Leo into a choice. But he only laughed and changed the subject. When pressed to show his true feelings, Leo hesitated, then told Alice that his emotions were ruled by his mind, in a controlled state of “active passivity.”8

  Moving in the social circles that included his large family and his parents’ many associates, Leo had occasion to meet several young women as he grew to manhood. But aside from Alice, whom he viewed in a fondly familiar way, and Lola, who intrigued him for many years, Leo suffered his most intense—but distant—passion for a third young woman: Mizzi Gebhardt Freund. An engaging beauty with sparkling eyes, she put his “active passivity” to its ultimate test. She was clever and coquettish. She was humorous. And she was married—to Emil Vidor’s brother-in-law, the prosperous brewer Emil Freund. Mizzi Freund was adept at social conversation but was also probing with her questions, and Leo found her utterly fascinating. Although he rarely saw her, when they did meet, it was usually in just the social situations that made Leo uneasy: large family dinners or parties with relatives.

  His brooding romanticism for Mizzi amused Bela and Rose, who staged a humorous photograph to mock Leo’s formal self-control. Arranged when Leo was about seventeen, the picture was staged and taken by Bela in a warehouse at the Freund brewery. Its theme was “Cooling the Passions,” with a bucket and watering can on hand to quench both Leo’s love and Mizzi’s flirtatiousness. “We wanted to dress Leo in sackcloth, but he refused,” Bela recalled. “He was not amused by this at all. He was furious.”

  In the photograph, Mizzi, the focus of attention, sits in the center, under an A-framed ladder. Her hands are folded demurely on her lap, but her legs cross in a jaunty pose. She smiles with radiant delight, no doubt amused by this odd grouping and perhaps aware of Bela’s scheme. To the right, leaning forward on a cane and sporting a bowler hat, stands Mizzi’s husband, Emil Freund, looking stern and prosperous.9 To the left stands Leo, his feet shifting forward, his left arm almost touching Mizzi’s elbow. Leo wears a heavy double-breasted topcoat, a stiff-collared shirt, and a formal suit. His bowler hat is perched atop the ladder, and by his right foot stands a watering can. But his expression—as he seems to stare into the camera, and through it—reveals a soul straining to remain detached from a scene while knowing how painfully he is stuck within it.

  Behind this personal triangle hangs a painted theatrical backdrop showing flower-filled urns and distant ruins. From beneath the ladder peers Leo’s older cousin Otto Scheiber, winking through a monocle and sporting the Austro-Hungarian army uniform he had just received as a conscript in the world war. On the left side of the ladder, near the top, stands Rose Szilard, almost grinning as she balances a bucket above Leo’s shoulder. On the right side stands Emil Vidor’s wife, Rezsin (Regine), Emil Freund’s sister, in a mock-serious pose.

  Leo was trapped in this humiliating situation and tortured by his stifled love for Mizzi, but from most other emotional ordeals he was able to escape into the manifold mysteries of science, which he pursued with fresh intensity as he matured. Once a high school course piqued his interest in physics, Leo’s father bought him scientific equipment for birthday presents. And although Leo understood most theories behind class demonstrations well before the instructor could explain them, he never lost his fascination with the subject, remained spellbound by the experiments, and often tried to repeat them at home. A laboratory “demonstrator” for the physics and chemistry teachers, Leo escaped the usual resentments against students who earn top grades because, he surmised, his academic success came without really trying.

  Humor afforded Leo another escape from emotional pressures, and he embraced and nurtured an ironic wit for the rest of his life. He saw comical forces in everything, which meant that his own pointed and sardonic jokes were frequently misunderstood. For enjoyment he read and reread Max und Moritz and other works by Wilhelm Busch, a droll and caustic turn-of-the-century German humorist and cartoonist.

  For more serious entertainment, Leo read German novels and the recollections of Van Eyck, a celebrated engineer. One favorite, Hinter Pflug und Schraubstock (Behind the Plow and Vise), described celebrated engineering problems and misfortunes, including hopeless efforts to substitute tilling by plow and oxen for hand-hoe cultivation in the Egyptian cotton fields and a huge bridge’s collapse at the Firth of Tay in Scotland. Still later, Leo devoured utopian books about new kinds of worlds and sat for hours devising better social and political organizations of his own. H. G. Wells excited him with both science fiction and political inventiveness, especially in The Time Machine. Leo also enjoyed Edward Bellamy’s futuristic speculation in Looking Backward, a technique he would employ years later in The Voice of the Dolphins. He liked reading histories of the French Revolution, Plato’s Republic, books by economist Henry George, Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries, and George Bernard Shaw’s plays and political writings. And for most of his life Leo was intrigued by the Peloponnesian War and mentioned often its lessons for modern times.

  Beginning in adolescence, Leo Szilard was al
so preoccupied with what he boldly called “saving the world.” As a boy of ten or twelve, the world to be saved contained only his family, his younger siblings, and his cousins as they lived and played together in the Vidor Villa and its gardens. But by high school, a growing sense of cynicism about politics, especially as played out by the empires and monarchies that clashed in the world war, led Szilard to worry about the fate of kingdoms and nations and the pivotal alliances they forged. In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated at Sarajevo, Bosnia. Tensions and misperceptions compounded the crime, and by July 28, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, beginning World War I.

  “When war was declared we were on vacation in Velden [on the Wörther See in Austria],” Louis Szilard remembered.

  Leo brought us the news the very moment it became known, pale with excitement, running to us from the post office, where he had heard about it. Everybody wanted to get home in a hurry. We managed to get on the train to Vienna even though it was already overcrowded. In Vienna, the demand for room on the trains was so great that we could get to Budapest only by boat. We arrived there on the morning of the second day, and back in our apartment, we were happy to have the trip behind us. I hastened to my bank in order to have all my securities sold on that very day and so to avoid even greater losses; 25 percent of my assets were already lost by then.10

  Leo remembered that wartime journey home to Budapest for another reason. “I was certainly remarkably free of emotional involvement during the First World War,” he recalled in 1960. On the ride to Vienna,

  more and more troop trains pulled alongside the train or passed us. Most of the times, the soldiers in all these trains were drunk. Some of the fellow passengers, looking out of a window and seeing the troop trains pass by, made a remark to my parents that it was heartening to see all this enthusiasm; and I remember my comment, which was that I could not see much enthusiasm but I could see much drunkenness. I was immediately advised by my parents that this was a tactless remark, which I am afraid had only the effect that I made up my mind then and there that if I had to choose between being tactless and being untruthful, I would prefer to be tactless. Thus my addiction to the truth was victorious over whatever inclination I might have had to be tactful.11

  Back in Budapest, Leo was considered “almost a traitor” when he chided his older relatives with frank opinions about the inferior military strength of the allied Austro-Hungarian and German Central Powers. And at school that fall, while Leo was as confused as his classmates about what the war meant, he still knew with certainty “how the war ought to end.” The Central Powers should be defeated, he declared, but so should their enemy, Russia.

  In retrospect I find it difficult to understand how at the age of sixteen, and without any direct knowledge of countries other than Hungary, I was able to make this statement. Somehow I felt that Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were weaker political structures than both France and England. At the same time I felt that Russia was a weaker political structure than was the German Empire.

  He also relied on intuition about right and wrong and later wrote that it seemed unlikely that “the two nations located in the center of Europe [Austria-Hungary and Germany] should be invariably right and practically all the other nations should be invariably wrong,” in ascribing blame for the war’s beginning.12

  The war became less theoretical for Leo on January 22, 1916, when an express telegram arrived, assigning him to the Fifth Fortress Regiment.13 Szilard may have feared military service but outwardly struck a cavalier pose. “Austria-Hungary will lose this war soon,” he told Bela and his friends, “so there was no danger of my being in uniform.”

  A few of Leo’s classmates resented his rational, unpatriotic candor, but most of them admired him for both his knowledge and his direct, unconventional thinking. At a farewell party at the Vidor Villa after high school graduation, those closest to Leo emptied several bottles of champagne and fell into good-natured kidding. They hailed him with a ditty:

  The trouble with you dear Leo, is this:

  Your ears are long and hairy like lynx’s

  You don't ever ask questions but give us the answers.

  And those are always right. Damn you and thank you.

  Physics, chemistry, and mathematics had become Szilard’s favorite subjects in the last years of high school; but when he graduated with highest honors, in June 1916, his choices seemed dismal.14 “There was no career in physics in Hungary,” he wrote later.

  If you studied physics, all that you could become was a high school teacher of physics—not a career that had any attraction for me. Therefore I considered seriously doing the next best thing and studying chemistry. I thought that if I studied chemistry I would learn something that was useful in physics and I would have enough time to pick up whatever physics I needed as I went along. This I believe in retrospect was a wise choice. But I didn’t follow it, for all those whom I consulted impressed upon me the difficulty of making a living even in chemistry, and they urged me to study engineering. I succumbed to that advice, and I cannot say that I regret it, because whatever I learned while I was studying engineering stood me in good stead later after the discovery of the fission of uranium.15

  The Palatine Joseph Technical University (Kir. József-Muegyetem), now the Budapest Technical University, stands on the Danube embankment in Buda, just below the gray cliffs of Gellért Hill. Then, as today, the grounds resembled a Victorian college campus. Szilard rode the streetcar there each day, beginning in September 1916: from his neighborhood in the Garden District, around the broad Museum Körút, over the ornate wrought-iron Franz Josef (now Szabadság) Bridge, to the busy plaza by the neo-romantic Gellért Hotel. At the university, Szilard enrolled in civil engineering, and within a month he entered a national competition sponsored by the Hungarian Association for Mathematics and Physics. Without effort he won second prize. At the time, physics was a subject he had been inclined toward even as he studied other topics.16 Ironically, this was a good time to study physics in Hungary, Szilard noted later, because the courses were so bad that a student was forced to develop independent thinking and originality.17

  In the Faculty of Civil Engineering for the academic year 1916–17, Szilard had no choice of courses and studied chemistry and general mechanics.18 During his second semester, early in 1917, he studied analysis and geometry, projective geometry, drawing, and strength of materials experiments. But he was becoming impatient with some subjects and bored with the practical studies. As in high school, he enlisted Bela’s help and on many Saturdays took him by streetcar to the university. There, in the drafting room for first-year engineering students, Beta executed Leo’s drawings while Leo sat nearby chatting about politics with his colleagues. A favorite topic was resistance to the Austrian monarchy in Vienna.

  For no apparent reason, Szilard decided not to take his exams at the end of his first semester, in January 1917, but instead transferred to the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, where he studied harder and attended new lectures and workshops. Here he was a good but not brilliant student, earning the grade of 6, the highest, in analysis and geometry, and in chemistry. He earned 5 for both theory and practice of projective geometry, and 6 for theory and 4 for practice in drawing. Szilard also conducted strength of materials experiments in the spring of 1917 but received no grade.

  Academic and military activities began to conflict for Szilard during his second school year, in the 1917–18 semesters. Although his report card shows that he studied analysis and geometry, machine elements, workshop practice, electrical measurements, and steel structures, he took no exams and received no grades. (The grades he earned in four other courses came only by taking exams after the end of the world war.) In the 1917–18 school year, Szilard again did well but not brilliantly, earning a 6 in physics with little effort. In mechanical drawing he earned 6 for theory and 5 for practice; in mechanics, 5 for theory and 6 for practice. But for practical courses S
zilard’s performance was poor: 4s in chemical technology and in casting and forming of metals; a 3 in electrotechnics.

  The war that Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II predicted would end by Christmas, 1914, had persisted more than three years before Szilard was drawn into it. Although notified in January 1916 that he would serve, he was allowed to continue engineering studies until the summer of 1917. On September 27, 1917, Szilard entered the Austro-Hungarian army as a one-year volunteer19 in the Fourth Mountain-Artillery Regiment, Unit 18. Immediately he was assigned to Reserve Officer School in Budapest and so continued to visit his family; he sometimes even sat in on classes at the Technical University.20

  Szilard was hardly a model officer candidate, for he still assumed that the conflict was about to end, yet he managed to impress his instructors at the Reserve Officer School. They liked the way he grasped scientific and technical problems, and they remembered him as the only student who could explain how the telephone worked. By his wits Szilard finished third in his class.21 Later, Szilard would make light of this success, but Bela and his parents were surprised at how easily he took to barracks life and to military studies. Every few Sundays, Szilard arranged to come home to the Vidor Villa for dinner, and around the table he entertained the family with tales about the camaraderie with classmates and the hilarious stupidity of some senior officers. He quickly made friends with other trainees and even joined in their singing and drinking. He also became visibly stronger, impressing Alice Eppinger and her friends with his handsome appearance in uniform.22