Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

“Trude wants us to go on the river,” Szilard told Kurti. “She has packed us a hamper with tea and cakes.” Kurti owned a folding canvas canoe, which he offered to the couple. Trude was delighted, and off they walked across the meadows to the river Cherwell, a narrow channel lined with weeping willows and wildflowers that meanders through college playing fields and into the Thames. In an orchard by the riverbank, Szilard eyed the craft suspiciously. He reached down and wiggled it, cautiously placing one, then the other, foot inside, and sat down.

  “What’s the point of putting it in the water?” Szilard asked, grinning across the gunwales. “Let’s have our picnic right here. We can sit in the boat and see the water; we don’t have to be in it.” And there they sat, munching on cakes, sipping tea, and looking about from their grass-bound canoe. At the time, Kurti thought Szilard overdid the logic of this situation, and only years later learned from Trude that it wasn’t logic behind this escapade but fear. Szilard suffered from aquaphobia, which he masked with playfully intense rationality.1

  In an avuncular way, Szilard was pleased to have Trude in England. He seemed to enjoy her company and introduced her to friends in Oxford and London. He apparently had no romantic need to be with her but was flirtatious in a nervous and adolescent way. His joy with Trude seemed to come from providing for her safety and well-being. He called her Kind and wanted to protect her from the coming war.

  Nazi propaganda from the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin that summer and Germany’s treaty guaranteeing Austrian neutrality gave Szilard further evidence that Hitler was planning to go to war.2 Trude had returned to Vienna in September, and when Mussolini and Hitler signed a treaty establishing the Rome-Berlin Axis a month later, Szilard feared for both her safety and that of his family. In November he returned home to Budapest and urged his parents and brother: “Come to America.” But, again, they shook their heads, as they had to Leo’s warnings when Hitler first took power. Leo worried too much, they thought. To him the future was one dark cloud. From Vienna, Szilard brought Trude back across the Continent to London, where she rented a room on Cromwell Road in Kensington and enrolled in medical classes at the Post-Graduate Medical College in nearby Hammersmith.

  In Oxford, Szilard resumed his neutron experiments and, by late December, signed a formal agreement with Arno Brasch’s wealthy uncle, financier Isbert Adam of Danzig, for isotope-separation patents. This contract paid Szilard more than $14,000 over the next year, providing his first financial security since leaving Germany more than three years before.3 With that Szilard began “playing with the idea” of visiting America in the spring, ostensibly to attend the Third Conference on Theoretical Physics at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) in Washington, more likely to follow a restless urge he could scarcely comprehend or contain.4 He did sail to America in the spring of 1937 but never attended the annual conference in Washington; for most of his time on this short visit he tried to find investors for his isotope-separation patents and to arrange for immigration papers for himself and Trude. His letters to Trude betray a fear that she might not follow him to America and, indeed, might be too distracted or confused to make a rational decision herself. “I will keep my fingers crossed tightly, hoping that you will surely come, too,” Szilard wrote in his jumbled, free-association style just before his liner steamed from Southampton.

  Have a good look at England and make the most of it so that you can differentiate between the two when you come to America. . . . The third class of the Queen Mary is built very beautifully. I have discovered one sympathetic- looking man (not in the mirror), but I am hoping for more. So take care and be cheerful.5

  The day before landing in New York, Szilard wrote to recount a so-so crossing.

  The weather was not good, but because of the combination of “depressing” action of the hyoscine [a drug Trude had recommended] and the “cheering up” action of your radiogram, nothing bad has happened so far. . . . Please do not fall to pieces again! Otherwise, I have just finished reading a book that you should buy right away and credit it to my account: The Street of the Fishing Cat [by Jolan Foldes]. . . .6

  Once Szilard landed in New York he filed a declaration of intention to become a US citizen.7 From International House, a comfortably formal hostel for overseas students above the Hudson River near Columbia University, he wrote Trude that “everybody here is very nice to me; because they feel that I do not want anything from them.”8 Szilard promised to check on New York medical-examination requirements and a week later wrote with detailed instructions about obtaining a visa and applying for a medical license. Szilard again urged Trude to visit New York and reported meeting a doctor friend of his sister’s named Keresztury, who had offered Trude a place to stay.

  We have beautiful sunshine here, very bracing air; everybody is in good spirits and very helpful. The only doubt I have concerns a certain degree of anti-Semitism, especially in medical circles, which you would have to come to terms [with].9

  While in New York, Szilard began to doubt his own plans:

  I am fairly reserved and low-key, which is probably not bad in terms of success, but the reason is (unfortunately) that I am not in high spirits in spite of the sun. Today I dreamt the following: (As an illustration) I had a carcinoma under the skin on the left side of my chest that could not be operated on, and I knew that nothing could be done about it. I felt perfectly all right with it, and I started to get everything in order. I bequeathed part of the interest on my $10,000 to my family, and the rest I would give to you over a period of three to four years because I thought that you would need larger sums in the near future and that afterwards you would have a good job, anyway, or you would be married to a man with money. My mother wanted to know if it was for sure that it was a carcinoma and wanted to look at it, but I told her that I knew for sure and that I was too busy to dress and undress and that she could look at it in the evening when I would go to bed, anyway. So I took care of everything, and then I began to be interested in poison to end the affair once things would start to become painful.

  Suicide in the face of painful death became a serious, and apparently recurrent, concern for Szilard; he would ponder it again when he did suffer from cancer in 1960. But here Szilard catches himself. “It was one of these typical dreams that are not worth analyzing because they are more interesting on the surface than underneath. Otherwise, I feel fine, and I am glad I came here during my lifetime,” Then his introspection returns, along with a retreat to reason, as he continues:

  It is characteristic that I am excited about every airplane that thunders overhead as a symbol of progress; in England I looked at airplanes with a frown. However, I am not sure if I want to live here myself, but if I were younger, I would certainly do it. I am in the mood to keep Oxford on a half-time basis, but this idea is still too vague to be discussed. Make sure that you have a real rest and get everything in order with the main [immigration] officer as well as you can; but do not take things too seriously! Have a very good time.

  —Yours L. Sz.10

  Szilard’s life had become so unsettled by this time that he appears to have made no effort to attend the Washington meeting and sailed from New York aboard the RMS Aquitania on May 12, 1937.11 In England he found it impossible to take up his full-time research but instead shifted between the Clarendon Hotel in Oxford and a room at Trude’s address in London.

  In June 1937, Szilard met Arno Brasch in Paris, trying to decide where their research on isotope separation might lead. Szilard considered, among other things, whether “induced radioactivity” might be used as “storage energy” to “drive aeroplane motors or rockets. . . .” And he made tentative calculations, but weeks later asked Brasch to double-check all work, including data from published articles by physicists Enrico Fermi and Ernest Lawrence. Szilard’s mood wobbled, enthusiastic about an idea in one sentence, skeptical in the next.12

  His career plans were shaky, too. Szilard annoyed Lindemann, his benefactor, by suggesting a half-time research post at the Clar
endon Laboratory, then failing to keep the appointment set to discuss it. “I am not particularly enamored of your plan of working in Oxford half the year and the other half in America, especially if half of the time you should spend in England is spent in London,” Lindemann complained. It was “quite useless” for Szilard “to endeavor to work here” unless he were to spend only summers in America.13

  But that summer Szilard had other plans, and for the first time in months he seemed in a feisty mood. Aboard the cross-Channel ferry he had spotted Miss Singer, a physiologist he had met years earlier at lunches and country weekends with her uncle Charles Singer, and was miffed that she would not chat with him for the whole journey. He approached another woman, “who looked as if she came from Cambridge.” She had, and was a medical student who knew Szilard’s friend Maurice Goldhaber. Szilard invited her to come along to Switzerland, and again he seemed disappointed when she refused. Was Szilard, who described these flirtations in a letter to Trude, being boastful or playfully naive?

  “Do you understand?” he asked Trude before describing how in Switzerland he flirted with “a really beautiful girl on the bus.” When he could find no language to speak with her, Szilard concluded: “Well, there are also some mountains to flirt with.”14

  His first morning in St. Moritz, Szilard climbed 700 meters “right away” and the next day took a 20-kilometer hike. During his two weeks there, Szilard was “momentarily disabled by a sunburn that nonetheless does not affect my friendly feelings toward the sun.” He loved to brainstorm with friends and colleagues (alone, or with others, he called these mental excursions “botching”) and reported to Trude that with Brasch he would “botch between breaks.” Reading the newspaper every day, he wrote, convinced him that “everything happens, I am sad to say, according to my predictions, but that no longer concerns me. Everything is moving really quickly. . . ,”15

  Between hikes, Szilard wrote letters to coax Trude back from Vienna to London and on to America. In Vienna, meanwhile, Trude struggled with her emotions to leave home. None of her letters survive, but from Szilard’s reactions it is clear that her psychiatrist’s views annoyed him. “Your idea that I do not want to meet you on the Continent because I do not want to make it any easier for you to leave Vienna is, I am sorry to say, consumed by ideas about relationships and considerations,” he complained. Szilard admonished Trude for making her departure “difficult for yourself” and, by implication, for him as well. “You are not making any decision on principle.”16

  A daylong train trip brought Szilard through the Swiss Alps to Lausanne, where he and Bela met to visit their sister, Rose, and her husband, the painter Roland Detre. A heavy rain prompted Leo to design a collapsible umbrella—full-sized when in use but many times smaller when folded— and he enlisted Rose, a textile and fashion designer, and Bela to help construct a model. In the Detres’ small apartment all day, Leo and Bela crouched and crawled on the floor, cutting apart a large black umbrella. They struggled—by trial, error, and more error—to transform Leo’s idea into a working model, but by early evening they had only managed to clutter the floor with shreds of black cloth and twisted, shiny struts. After hours of good-natured experimenting, many groans, and a few chuckles, they admitted defeat.17

  During his trip to Switzerland that summer, Szilard had decided to emigrate to the United States, another reason for meeting Rose and Bela in September. Back in England that month, Szilard busied himself with plans to move with Trude to New York. But he also kept Lindemann informed about experiments to produce artificial radioactive elements, maintaining his hope that the key to nuclear chain reactions might at last be found.18 Before sailing for New York, Szilard visited Maurice Goldhaber in Cambridge for a farewell dinner. At Magdalene College that evening he dined at the high table with Goldhaber and the literary critic I. A. Richards, and afterward they retired to the common room for port.

  “I’ll soon be going to the United States for a visit,” Richards announced.

  “You had better buy a one-way ticket,” quipped Szilard.19

  By late November, as he made plans to sail for New York, Szilard received a strangely appealing letter from Frédéric Joliot-Curie, an invitation to join his nuclear-research staff at the Collège de France in Paris. Joliot boasted about the power of his laboratory equipment and urged Szilard to conduct his experiments in artificial radioactivity there.20 Szilard must have thought hard about this opportunity, delaying an answer— and his sailing—for nearly a month. But when he did reply, on Christmas Eve, 1937, Szilard was aboard the RMS Franconia. With his regrets Szilard sent Joliot a foil of indium, still his candidate to set off a chain reaction, and urged him to bombard it with photoneutrons to confirm an experiment Szilard had done recently at Oxford.21 As Szilard sailed toward New York, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) wrote to announce an end to his Clarendon Laboratory grant. Beginning in January, support would be made just three months at a time, so the most he could expect to earn as a half-time researcher was $1,000 a year.22

  After the Franconia docked in New York on January 2, 1938, Szilard later claimed, he “did nothing but loaf.” This is misleading. He did not apply for a university or commercial research position, but his private records and correspondence reveal that he was hardly idle. Driving him on was his four-year-old “obsession” to create a nuclear chain reaction.

  “You didn’t know what he was up to,” the Columbia physicist Isidor I. Rabi later complained. “He was always a bit mysterious.”23 At about this time, Szilard’s friends the Polanyi brothers tried to help arrange a private research grant for him in England. A potential patron wanted a “detailed, objective opinion on the person of Szilard,” something that may help “to sort out reliably the many contradictory facets of his character,” Karl Polanyi wrote Michael. His insightful analysis of Szilard follows:

  Enmity to him is partly based on formalities, such as curt behavior, which does not serve the purpose when official personalities are to be faced. What is needed is not a recommendation or a declaration of trust but a clarification. Nobody understands his motives, his interests, his attitude. His lack of selfinterest evokes mistrust. Nobody understands his “essential” aims; in other words, one doubts the sincerity of his selflessness. So the following characteristics would have to be clarified; his curtness in view of his otherwise obvious worldliness, his organizing work [for the AAC], and the setting aside of his own ambitions. (Incidentally, I never knew that he is of a high rank as a scientist.) It would be entirely wrong, as I said before, to furnish anything in the way of panegyrics. What is needed is an analysis and explanation, keyed, so to speak, to his personality and to his total being. What is lacking in him, even shortcomings, should be conceded and should be put into relationship to his total achievements rather than denied or “explained away.” It would be desirable to submit this as an act of friendship. . . .

  As far as I myself am concerned, I consider S. one of the rarest phenomena, to be judged in a positive way, a person whose qualities can be utilized only with difficulty in the present economic system. He is what he seems to be: an idealist devoted to the task. As his consciousness, however, is materialistic, leaning to experimenting, and agnostic, he fails to understand himself, same as the world fails to understand him. I am holding him in honor, and I value him.24

  In New York, Szilard moved into the King’s Crown, a cozy nine-story hotel between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive, at 420 West 116th Street. (Then a commercial hotel, the building is now an apartment house for Columbia University faculty.) Located just east of Columbia, this would become a haven for much of the rest of his life. There he quickly fell into a routine, walking to a corner pharmacy each morning to buy a newspaper or two and eat a breakfast (or two) while perched on a stool at the narrow Formica counter.

  Trude had arrived three weeks before Leo and had found a sublet apartment on Riverside Drive, in the building where his friend Benjamin Liebowitz lived. By the following September she would become an int
ern and extern at Bellevue Hospital, riding ambulances and working for a while in the emergency room.25 In his spare moments Szilard visited her or, more often, scribbled and mailed her short notes.

  For the most part, his thoughts were elsewhere. In January and February, Szilard nagged Bela in Budapest with letters warning that the Nazis were about to conquer Europe, and in March, when Hitler announced Anschluss, a political union between Germany and Austria, Szilard cabled Bela: “NOW OR NEVER.” By this time Bela had decided to leave, although his parents refused to budge. In fact, Bela couldn’t budge, either, unless he found a way to arrange for an immigration quota. When three months passed without one, Leo tried shooting some “big cannon,”26 Through Lewis L. Strauss, a Wall Street financier with whom he was negotiating isotope projects, Szilard reached a former under secretary of state, who made a few calls that yielded, by June, an allotment for the Szilards to immigrate through Montreal.27

  To Lindemann, Szilard also wrote, in an almost cocky manner, but with no details, that his experiments at Oxford, comparing slow neutron and photoneutron absorption, “strongly threatens the current theory of the nucleus.” Also with no other details, Szilard bragged that he and Brasch were in touch with persons who might finance an accelerator to make medical isotopes.28 These no doubt included Strauss, whom Szilard first met “early in 1938” through a mutual acquaintance. With Brasch, Szilard began negotiating to build a “surge generator” to make isotopes for medical treatment. Strauss was eager to produce radioactive cobalt isotopes for cancer treatment, as a medical memorial to his parents, who had both recently died of cancer.29

  Radium then cost about $50,000 a gram, but Brasch and Szilard convinced Strauss that their artificially irradiated cobalt, with a much shorter half-life, would cost only a few dollars a gram. Through a mutual friend, former president Herbert Hoover, Strauss approached Robert A. Millikan at the California Institute of Technology, who agreed to host the experiment.30 And Strauss tried to interest executives at Westing-house in Pittsburgh, General Motors in Detroit, and General Electric in Schenectady, taking Szilard along on his visits. At GE, Szilard met the same skepticism he had faced four years before with the company’s British branch; nuclear energy, an official told him, was “for the science fiction fans,”31