Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  After brainstorming with Einstein a few more times, Szilard called in a draftsman—an engineer he had first met in Budapest named Lazislas Bihaly—and as the three men sat together in Einstein’s study, their ideas for an electromagnetic pump took shape on paper. Bihaly sketched a rough plan; Einstein and Szilard stared in thought, inserted details, questioned the lines and the scale. Then they sent Bihaly off to draft a final sketch, and Szilard, punching clumsily on his landlady’s typewriter, wrote out a patent application.11

  The heart of the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator design was a pump that circulated a liquid-metal coolant by creating electromagnetic pulses in an array of coils around a long tube. Just the kind of elegant simplicity both men esteemed. But would it work? Once Szilard had filed a German patent, he called on Siemens, the international electronics firm, and when they turned him down, he approached General Electric of Germany (AEG). They bought the idea, hired Szilard as a part-time consultant, and invited him to their laboratories. There Szilard built a prototype, and after months of work, a test model. The pump was set on a shop bench and switched on. The liquid metal, a sodium-potassium alloy, began to gurgle through the tube. Szilard grinned with delight for a few seconds. The machine was working beautifully, but as the metallic stream accelerated, the men around the bench heard a low hum that grew to a whine and finally swelled to a shriek. “It howled like a banshee,” Szilard reported to Bela. Hardly the right sound for a family kitchen.

  In all, Einstein and Szilard filed eight joint patents for their electromagnetic pump and its related parts. But the domestic-refrigerator market was soon dominated by General Electric’s Monitortop design, with motor and cooling coils in a turbanlike array above the cabinet. Not until the late 1940s would their pump prove its worth to circulate liquid-metal coolants in an advanced nuclear power plant called a “breeder,” a reactor that Szilard himself would both conceive and name during World War II.

  Besides refrigerators, Szilard and Einstein shared a sense of wonder about religion and cosmology. “As long as you pray to God and ask him for something, you are not a religious man,” Einstein said during one of their many talks. Szilard agreed.12 Instead, they sought to understand the universe by discovering its essential nature. To a student in Berlin, Einstein had declared: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.” And to philosopher Martin Buber, Einstein had once said that what physicists strive for “is just to draw His lines after Him.”

  Einstein’s God was “subtle” but “not malicious,” meaning that He was consistent in His rules. So, by his often quoted thought that “God does not play dice with the universe,” Einstein affirmed that His world had rules that were knowable and then predictable—if only you could ask the right questions. When a New York rabbi once asked Einstein about his faith, he answered that he believed “in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.”13.

  As biographer Ronald W. Clark put it, “Einstein’s God thus stood for an orderly system obeying rules which could be discovered by those who had the courage, the imagination, and the persistence to go on searching for them.”14 Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher and lens maker who combined the ancient Hebrew Scriptures with science in a quest that was profoundly spiritual, became a model for Einstein and Szilard as they mused about God and nature. They read Ethics, Spinoza’s principal work, and they read his letters. Notes about Spinoza creep into their own letters and postcards, for to them he was another independent mind in search of all that was knowable.15

  The most sustained contact between Szilard and Einstein began in 1926 as they worked to design their electromagnetic pump, and this friendship of occasional visits and letters continued until after the last related patent was filed in 1930.16 This collaboration overlapped with Einstein’s own pioneering work on a unified field theory, which he published to widespread press acclaim in January 1930. Szilard’s letters during their early friendship were prosaic; Einstein’s, often ironic and sometimes even whimsical: In 1928, Einstein addressed Szilard as “Dear Dulder,” slang for sufferer or toiler, and chided him for being too logical. He “tends to overestimate the role of rational thought in human life,” Einstein once wrote of Szilard and his political reform scheme.17

  Szilard and Einstein continued to write to one another about their refrigerator patents, and in 1931, Szilard enlisted his mentor to write a letter to the American consul in Berlin to support a visa application to visit the United States. Szilard’s draft letter for Einstein had the famous scientist declare, “In that the purpose of this projected trip is the advancement of our commutual work, I have a direct personal interest in the granting of an entrance visa.”18 Einstein’s letter worked, and Szilard sailed for New York. On this first American trip Szilard visited his friend Eugene Wigner, then a math and physics teacher at Princeton University. Szilard traveled to Washington on patent business. And he dropped in on the physics department at New York University.

  Restless and unsure what to do and unwilling to seek work in America, Szilard returned to Berlin in the spring of 1932, where he resumed writing and calling on Einstein. The two kibitzed about physics and their colleagues. But while Szilard wondered aloud about his own future, he would never ask Einstein for help directly.19 Szilard resumed teaching courses at the university but only dabbled in research, and when the semester ended in July, he traveled about Europe aimlessly. From Zurich that summer Szilard wrote to Einstein about their refrigerator designs and sought his signature on a letter to secure partial payment for patent rights. An AEG contract, Szilard wrote, would allow him “to tour America for about a year” or otherwise “possibly spend some time on an intermezzo in England.”20

  By the fall of 1932, Szilard seemed to have more doubts than ever about his career, but he still hesitated to ask Einstein for help. Instead, Szilard wrote to Wigner, who also worried about his friend’s seeming inability to seek—or even decide on—a job. From Princeton, Wigner wrote to their mutual friend Michael Polanyi in Berlin, and Polanyi raised the matter with Einstein.

  13 October 1932

  Dear Professor,

  I am writing to you in the interest of my friend Szilard, who finds himself in a rather difficult situation. Now that the matter of the refrigerator is coming to an end without having furnished him with the hoped-for financial independence, he has to find a way for his further livelihood that suits his peculiar character and gives him the opportunity of earning money. I believe that you, Professor, have particular goodwill for Szilard, and thus I permit myself to submit to you the following:

  To me it appears possible that Szilard could obtain a position at the Flexner Institute [the Institute for Advanced Study] in Princeton if you support him in this quest. I also believe that this would be a suitable solution for him, since he could do theoretical work there and he could at the same time be a guest at the experimental institutes of the university. Life in America would probably satisfy also his social aims.

  I have discussed this plan with Wigner, who thought of it even earlier. However, we did not want to do anything before your connection, dear Professor, with the Flexner Institute becomes publicly known. [Einstein would join the Institute the following year.]

  Now that Wigner is gone to America, it occurred to me that I should turn to you. (Szilard refused to ask you a favor where his own interest is involved.)

  Thus, may I ask you how you feel about this matter? Do you want to talk to Szilard about it? Or can I do anything in this matter, perhaps by inquiring about the local situation in Princeton, by asking Wigner or [Rudolph] Ladenburg? I believe that your decision will be of great importance for Szilard’s fate.

  Respectfully yours,

  Michael Polanyi21

  Replying within a week, Einstein declined to recommend Szilard to the in
stitute. Despite an admiration for Szilard’s talents, Einstein thought him more gifted in technical sciences and experimental physics than in mathematical physics. But he agreed to recommend Szilard if an opening occurred at Princeton for an experimental physicist.22

  Szilard was so restless and impatient at this time that he left his rented room in Schöneberg and, as Polanyi’s guest, moved into Harnack House, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s faculty club in Dahlem.23 But within a few days Szilard left his Harnack House room vacant and traveled to London, where he wrote again to Einstein for help with a visa application to return to the United States.24 By now Szilard felt comfortable asking Einstein for advice and letters of support on almost any intellectual or legal matter, from promoting the Utopian political reform program he called the Bund to renewing a visa. Yet Szilard still hesitated to ask his mentor for help finding a job—not, it seems, because he doubted that Einstein would comply but rather because Szilard himself had no clear idea what he wanted to do.

  CHAPTER 7

  Restless Research and the Bund

  1922–1932

  In September 1922, a few weeks after receiving his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Berlin, Leo Szilard moved out of the rooms he shared with Bela at 2 Herderstrasse, in the city’s residential Charlottenburg neighborhood, and sublet a tiny furnished room from an elderly couple at 61 Zimmerstrasse.1 This put him in the center of the city and within a dozen blocks of the university. His new room was much cheaper, an advantage at a time when Szilard had no predictable income. But the savings came at a price: To reach his own room, and the bathroom, he had to walk through the landlord’s bedroom, a passage that offended Szilard’s acute sense of modesty.

  The move was one of a dozen Szilard—stirred by a restlessness that upset both his personal and professional life—made during his twelve years in Berlin. With a doctorate, Szilard briefly considered teaching physics and in October asked his friend Michael Polanyi to write to a professor he knew at the University of Frankfurt. “I would like to recommend in the highest terms Dr. Szilard,” wrote Polanyi. “He has a thesis worked out entirely on his own, a study in thermodynamics for his doctorate, which is of a fundamental nature, and on his own initiative. Prof. [Otto] Stern . . . calls him a fabulously wise man. . . ,”2

  There is no record that Szilard pursued a job in Frankfurt or anywhere else, for he preferred his life in Berlin, passing the days in lectures and seminars and the nights brainstorming with colleagues in cafés. Szilard later enjoyed sitting in the front row of a quantum mechanics seminar given by his friend John von Neumann, asking questions and posing his own clever answers. At Szilard’s side for many of these sessions sat Erwin Schrödinger, a theoretical physicist from Vienna. (Schrödinger would soon develop a theory of “wave mechanics” as a new way to view the behavior of atomic matter, and for this work would share with Paul Dirac the 1933 Nobel Prize in physics.) With conjectures and criticisms flying among von Neumann, Szilard, and Schrödinger, students must have felt bewildered, for this trio was defining new aspects of quantum theory as they went along.

  The three would also teach a course together a few years later and pair off to teach other topics.3 Schrödinger enjoyed Szilard’s participation and later recalled that he “. . . took an important part in all the discussions of our colloquia and seminaries. He was one of those to whom one always listens with greatest interest, for what he had to say was always of a profound and original kind. He very often points to an important point or to a view of the subject matter that would not occur to anybody else.”4

  Two days after Christmas in 1922, Szilard received a permit from the Berlin police that allowed him—as a long-term resident alien—to rent a furnished room in the city. Once assured that he could return to Berlin, Szilard boarded a train for his first trip home in more than three years. During two weeks in Budapest, he visited high school friends and chatted by the hour in the rococo splendor of the New York Café. At the family villa, he found his parents gloomy with financial problems; reluctantly, they had taken in a boarder to help make ends meet, and Louis Szilard, who had retired at age fifty-one in 1912, was back at work as an engineering consultant. The only consolation that Leo could give his parents was that life was far worse in Germany.

  While Szilard was home, French and Belgian troops marched into the Ruhr Valley in northwest Germany to enforce reparations payments to the victorious Allies of the world war.5 It was a bad beginning to a year that would see more economic and political unrest in the country. Inflation that began after the war now made life chaotic: When Szilard returned to Berlin in January 1923, the exchange rate was 7,000 marks to the US dollar and falling. Communists prompted uprisings in the northern state of Saxony. French agents backed separatist conspiracies in the Rhineland. And from a beer hall in Munich, a disgruntled veteran of the war, Adolf Hitler, led a putsch (revolt) to force local officials to swear allegiance to his National Socialist (Nazi) “revolution.” Army troops broke up the confrontation, and Hitler spent nine months in prison, where in angry confinement he wrote Mein Kampf a book that brought national publicity to this young reactionary and his grandiose ideas.

  Through the spring and summer of 1923, both Leo and Bela Szilard struggled along with most Berliners to simply survive. With the mark at 1 million to the US dollar and still dropping, people were paid daily and rushed out to spend their money, knowing its value would be even less by morning. Wallets were useless; shoppers used suitcases and wheelbarrows.

  Yet amid this turmoil Szilard seemed unperturbed. One spring day in 1923 he met Michael Polanyi and rode the U-Bahn (subway) out to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Physical Chemistry, where he was conducting research. Set in suburban Dahlem, southwest of the city center near the forest and park called Grünewald, the KWI had been created in 1910 as a privately funded center for research that would aid German industry’s scientific and technological development. In contrast to research at the state-run universities, work at the institute was to be practical and applied. But many scientists shuttled back and forth between the university downtown and the campus in Dahlem, in their brief commute closing the traditional gap between theoretical and applied research.

  “This is Dr. Leo Szilard, who has done his thesis in physics under Professor von Laue on a theoretical subject,” Polanyi told chemist Hermann Mark. “He would like to see what experimental methods are used today in modern physics and chemistry.” Mark, a bright and energetic Viennese who was investigating the structure of fibers, walked Szilard through the laboratories, explaining the elaborate X-ray diffraction equipment, then the most powerful and precise in the world. Szilard looked and listened intently and, in a room filled with X-ray scanners, eyed the gleaming machines carefully.

  “What are you doing with those instruments?” Szilard asked.

  “Analyzing cellulose and silk fibers,” Mark boasted, “and the behavior of metallic materials—zinc, copper, tin—when they are pressed and deformed.” Szilard looked disappointed.

  “You are wasting your time,” he declared. “With such an excellent apparatus, you should not work on the practical application of X-rays but on their own fundamental nature and basic properties. You should study the X-rays themselves!”

  At first, Mark resented Szilard’s arrogance, but a few moments later he realized its value. During the next several months Mark persuaded some of his colleagues to listen to Szilard, who soon became a regular visitor to the KWI. Some researchers continued to think Szilard haughty and intrusive as he wandered through the laboratories, asking questions and proposing new experiments for them to do. But once it became clear that his comments were often right and sometimes practical, Szilard was accepted, although with the title Generaldirektor.6

  Szilard also annoyed some fellow scientists when he filed for patents on his ideas. He did so, Szilard later wrote, to secure the money needed for independent research. But to many colleagues this practice seemed selfish and unscientific. Szilard filed his first patent, on
October 9, 1923, for an X-ray sensor element he conceived after viewing Mark’s equipment.7

  If Szilard’s motives seemed suspect, he could hardly be blamed for financial anxiety at the time. With no steady income, the occasional consulting and research fees Szilard earned were scarcely enough for both food and rent. In April 1923, Szilard left his awkward room on Zimmerstrasse and rejoined Bela at a new sublet at 211 Kaiser-Allée (now Bundes-Allée), a broad boulevard running south from the zoo railway station between the residential neighborhoods of Wilmersdorf and Schöneberg. Their landlady, a Mrs. Salomon, was a widow who could not maintain her large and elegant apartment against the storm of inflation and to meet expenses had dismissed the maid and rented out her room.

  Theirs was a large and airy room with high ceilings, and on a small table by a window most mornings the brothers shared a simple breakfast. Leo used student tickets to buy lunch at the university, and he attacked whatever was set out at teas and parties. Bela could eat a hearty lunch at his part-time job in an electronics company, and when together at night, the Szilards fixed a simple cold meal of cured meats, bread and butter, sometimes with tinned fish or fruits. Bela’s hand slipped one evening as he opened a sardine tin; the lid slit the knuckle of his left little finger, and blood spurted onto the tablecloth. When the bleeding continued, Leo became alarmed, took Bela by the arm, and led him a few blocks to a city-run first-aid station. Leo sat in a chair as Bela’s hand was doused with iodine and bandaged, and when the treatment was complete, Bela turned to find Leo in a dead faint, his head against the wall, his feet sprawled out across the tile floor.