At Brandeis two days a week, Szilard met with students and faculty in seminars but soon adopted a role that he considered far more important. “Leo said that his function was to head up the Happiness Committee,” Lerner recalled. “He said a university ran on the happiness of the faculty, and he wanted to be the one to think up ways of keeping them happy.” See that they are well paid, Szilard said, that their offices are comfortable, their graduate assistants are bright and eager, and that the faculty club food is appetizing. Then you will have a first-rate university!43
But a growing involvement at Brandeis only complicated Szilard’s already hectic life, adding a new stop on his bumblebee’s itinerary. With the King’s Crown Hotel in New York as his base, he wandered impulsively to the Quadrangle Club in Chicago and the Somerset or Statler hotels in Boston—also making quick visits to his ailing father, then ninety-two and living in a nursing home in Yonkers. Szilard visited the home every week or two and by mail advised the staff on his father’s diet and treatment. When in New York, Szilard also began work as a consultant to the president of the International Latex Corporation, Abram N. Spanel, and for the next few years spent many nights and weekends at Drumthwacket, Spanel’s mansion in Princeton.44
Szilard had not lived in a house since he left his family’s villa in 1919, and except for Drumthwacket he had no idea what domestic life was like. So one afternoon, when at Brandeis, he decided to visit Trude’s brother, Egon Weiss, and his wife, Renée, at their home in the nearby suburb of Cochituate. “I’m on a diet,” Szilard announced, walking in with a paper bag in his hand. From the bag he nibbled grapes throughout the visit, popping them into his mouth between rapid questions and quips. Egon was then studying library science at Simmons College, and Szilard was fascinated by the arrangement of knowledge into rational categories and the possibility that information might be ordered and retrieved by computers. But Szilard’s real focus that day was the Weiss’s house itself. “He was interested in what it cost, how it was heated, when it was painted,” recalled Renée Weiss. “He wanted to know how the toaster worked. What was in the basement. How we washed our clothes.”45
To friends and family, Szilard’s mention of a “diet” usually prompted grins, for his sweet tooth always won over his good intentions. In the ornate red plush Russian Tea Room in New York one day, Szilard was eating a nusstorte, a cake made with nuts, eggs, and sugar, when Efraim Racker and his wife, Franziska (Frances), Trude Weiss’s sister, walked in.
“How is your nusstorte?” asked Frances.
“This is no nusstorte,” Szilard said, a grin wrinkling his round face.
“This is a genusstorte,” genuss being the German word for enjoyment.46
Yet, periodically, he vowed to lose weight and boasted about his efforts, if not the results. Walking around the Hyde Park neighborhood with Milton Weiner, a student at his biology laboratory who was Enrico Fermi’s son-in-law, Szilard passed a haberdashery and remembered he had to buy some underwear. “I’m on a diet,” he said as they entered. “I need to get them smaller than before.” When Szilard picked a size and handed it to the clerk, the cleric suggested, politely, that they might not fit.
“But I’m on a diet,” Szilard insisted, to which the clerk replied: “The underwear don’t know that.”47
An itinerant life continued for Szilard even after he returned to the University of Chicago’s payroll in 1954 as professor of biophysics. Morton Grodzins, dean of the Division of the Social Sciences, described Szilard’s “responsibilities as a full-time member of the faculty” with wry amusement, for he had almost none. “I take pleasure in contemplating that a great physical scientist joins Chicago’s social science group in order initially to devote himself to biology,” he said of the arrangement. Later, Grodzins told Szilard that “the University will be satisfied with three months of annual residence provided that the University considers your activity while not in residence as being of substantial service to the University, to scholarship or to the public interest.”48
Understandably, Grodzins had trouble knowing what Szilard would do, because even he wasn’t sure. Szilard did know that he disliked Chicago’s harsh winters and hellish summers, and with Novick gone, he missed the daily thinking-and-tinkering routine that had made their biology laboratory so enjoyable. But where else could Szilard work? By the summer of 1954, Theodore Puck had told Szilard that a full-time biology appointment in Denver was “unlikely,” first citing a lack of funds but later admitting his deeper fear that Szilard might dominate the research.49 Szilard considered a research post at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and even had Einstein write a letter of introduction, but then barely pursued this opportunity. Instead, Szilard devised a “roving research professorship” for himself to permit occasional work at six institutions.50 But this plan was abandoned when he refused even to meet a potential funder’s minimal request for a work schedule.
By 1956, Szilard devised an even grander scheme when he enlisted New York University biologist Bernard Davis and others in sponsoring a “fellowship for life,” but he dropped the idea before it could be arranged and proposed, instead, a course of research at NYU on cancer of the prostate gland—to be funded, Szilard hoped, by a cancer-research foundation headed by his friend Lewis L. Strauss. At NYU’s Medical Center, Dr. Lewis Thomas offered laboratory facilities for the cancer research, but then Szilard balked because he feared no suitable assistants could be found.51 In 1956, Szilard asked for a research position at the Rockefeller Institute in New York but could do no better than accept the offer to become an unpaid “affiliate.” At the time, Szilard also drafted plans for a research institute at Brandeis, but he never followed through on this idea, either.
Szilard even wondered anew about atomic energy, looking beyond his tireless nuclear arms control efforts to the possibility that reactors might produce industrial heat and electricity. A few weeks after President Eisenhower announced his “Atoms for Peace” program, an ambitious plan to spread nuclear technology around the world, Szilard contacted John Menke, a Manhattan Project veteran who had founded Nuclear Development Associates in White Plains, New York, to export reactors. In 1955, Szilard gained new attention for his pioneering role in atomic research when his joint patent with Fermi for the first nuclear reactor was declassified and published. In 1956, Szilard wrote a memo on a proposed federal financing scheme for exporting nuclear power plants. And in a draft letter to the New York Times that summer, he proposed a full exchange of information on fusion energy with the Russians— an idea signed in 1992 by the US government. With fusion energy, Szilard believed, the large number of neutrons released could be used to convert thorium to fissionable uranium—one of the two “breeder” reactor schemes he had first pondered during the war.52
Early in 1957, two former colleagues wooed Szilard to reconsider nuclear physics. First, his thesis adviser in Berlin, Max von Laue, invited Szilard to head a new physics institute there. Szilard declined, and when he visited Berlin that October, it was to speak about molecular biology.53 But Szilard accepted when Edward Creutz, director of research for General Atomics (GA) in California, asked for “novel ideas” about new power reactors and “the possibility of your helping us get going in the atomic energy business.” Szilard admired Creutz, loved California, and agreed to become a consultant.54 But at the same time, Szilard’s enthusiasms also ran with a scheme he had just proposed to create a biology study center that would combine science and social problems: what became the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, now just down the road from GA in La Jolla.55
When Szilard arrived in La Jolla, he spent little time at GA’s futuristic headquarters, preferring to sit by his motel’s pool with a yellow pad on his lap, just botching. He began by making calculations on heat transfers in different alloys but quickly turned his thoughts to generating electricity directly from uranium fission, without employing steam to drive a turbine generator, as today’s nuclear power plants do. Szilard refused to sign an agreeme
nt that his inventions were GA’s property, complaining, “That’s not how my brain works.” He could not keep track of which concepts were his and which were the company’s, he said. “I have no idea where my thoughts come from and no control over where they go.”56 While in La Jolla, Szilard made crude and overly complicated drawings for a thermoelectric generator and later completed patent plans for the device. “It was clear that by this time Leo was no longer at the cutting edge of nuclear physics; was no longer a pioneer,” Creutz recalled. “He was stimulating to have around, but didn’t really contribute much to our work designing new reactors.”57
Another field Szilard had once pioneered was information theory, or “cybernetics,” which by the 1950s had developed under Claude E. Shannon at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey. Szilard had first linked the concepts of information and entropy in the 1920s. At the time, Szilard and his friend John von Neumann were teaching courses together at the University of Berlin, and in 1947, von Neumann reconsidered Szilard’s ideas and later urged Shannon to use the term “entropy” in his work.58 By the early 1950s, around Columbia University, Szilard also discussed his information-entropy ideas with physicist Leon Brillouin, and in 1952, at Brillouin’s suggestion, Szilard was invited to speak at an American Physical Society symposium on “Entropy and Information” during the society’s spring meeting in Washington. But here Szilard admitted his limitations and declined, saying: “All I could do is to present—as an introduction to the topic—the original considerations which I published in 1927. I have not done any further work in the field since I wrote this one paper.”59
For Szilard the joy of discovery was first having the idea, not applying it afterward. Szilard did not seek to tie his early insights to later commercial developments, although he and von Neumann talked about computers from time to time and in the 1950s von Neumann himself wanted to develop Szilard’s information-entropy ideas as part of his pioneering work in computer design. Not until the 1970s and 1980s, however, in two Scientific American articles about Maxwell’s demon and the second law of thermodynamics, did Szilard’s role in information theory gain the attention of a wider scientific community.60
In his wandering life in the 1950s, Szilard thought up dozens of inventions and even drew patent applications for a few: a pocket calculator to compute calories, a phonograph with both sonic and supersonic frequencies, a method to desalt seawater by freezing, and decades ahead of the cholesterol and fat scares of the 1980s, a line of cheeses and other dairy products with high-iodine vegetable oil substituted for more than 80 percent of the milk fats.61
But Szilard’s most memorable—even notorious—concoction was his extract for “rum tea,” and just recalling it makes some friends smile, and wince. The project began in the early 1950s when Hans Zeisel was research director of the Tea Board, an industry promotion group. Talking about tea one day, Szilard recalled from his Budapest childhood drinking rum tea, which was served like a hot toddy. Zeisel also remembered the drink from his youth in Vienna. Grinning with anticipation, Szilard vowed to invent an extract or pill that would allow them to mass-produce and market this delicacy. With help from Maurice Fox, a graduate student in his biology laboratory, Szilard brewed a rum extract and drained the thick brown liquid into a small medicine bottle, which he slipped into his suitcoat pocket. For months Szilard produced the bottle at restaurants, called for hot water, and carefully poured in a tot of his rum-tea extract.
“One can use water from the hot-water tap and does not need to boil it,” he told Trude. “It tastes better than Nestea,” a powdered instant tea then on the market, and boasted, “I have a full bottle in the bathroom and make myself tea every morning.” But as the extract took on a greenish tinge, Szilard reported to Zeisel that the concoction would not keep at room temperature. Szilard abandoned his hope for making instant rum tea only when he could devise no way around the stiff taxes on alcohol products. “All his thoughts, from inventing a rum-tea pill to controlling the bomb, centered around making this a better place to live,” Zeisel recalled fondly. “He just wanted to improve the whole world, and everything in it.”62
CHAPTER 22
Marriage on the Run
1951–1959
On a fall day in 1951, Leo Szilard strolled into the smoky chatter of the large dining room in the Quadrangle Club, surveyed the lively scene, and took a seat at the “physics table,” one of several round tables under the tall leaded-glass windows where different faculty specialties converged.
“Leo,” said Herbert Anderson, raising his voice across the noise as Szilard sat down. Anderson had known Szilard since 1939, when they collaborated with fellow physicist Enrico Fermi at Columbia University.
“Leo,” Anderson repeated, smiling. “I hear you got married.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Szilard replied, seeming annoyed.
“Ohhh . . . I read it in the newspapers.”
“Do you believe everything you read in the papers, Herb?”
“Should I believe this?” Anderson asked.
“If you want to,” Szilard said, and dropped his eyes to the menu.1
Aaron Novick worked almost daily with Szilard at the biology laboratory they had founded on campus, yet he only heard about the marriage when Harold Urey’s wife, Frieda, asked at a party if rumors of a secret wedding were true. University chancellor Robert Hutchins was also surprised when Anderson brought him the news.
“Who would marry Szilard?” Hutchins wondered. “It must have something to do with taxes.”2 Indeed, Walter Blum, a friend of Szilard’s at the law school who was legal counsel to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, only learned about the marriage when Szilard raised the subject of taxes. They brainstormed often about tax laws and loopholes, seeking ways for the university to profit from its tax-exempt status and as an intellectual game. But that fall, for the first time in their years of discussion, Szilard asked Blum about medical deductions, and when Blum answered, Szilard replied: “That figure is for a single person.”
“But the figure for married people doesn’t concern you.”
“Yes, it does,” said Szilard.
“Why?” Blum wondered.
“Because I am married.”
“I knew it would take something to do with taxes to persuade you to get married,” Blum teased. In response, Szilard just smiled,3 although with another friend he became flustered. “It was almost impossible to embarrass Szilard,” fellow Hungarian Edward Teller recalled. Teller saw Szilard and his girlfriend of many years together at a motel in Santa Fe and later heard they were married. But when Teller saw Szilard in Chicago a little later and congratulated him, he blushed. “Some people would have . . . blushed when found with their girlfriend, but that was natural for Szilard. . . . To get married was not natural for Szilard.”4
Szilard was secretive about his marriage to Gertrud (Trude) Weiss because he could scarcely admit it to himself. “I am a bachelor by birth,” he told a reporter six months after the wedding.5 For despite a serious relationship with Trude that had evolved over more than two decades, Szilard still nurtured an adolescent vow to shun emotional involvement—his way to focus and sharpen the clarity of his mind. He could be affectionate and solicitous with small children and childishly flirtatious with older women, but rarely had he been comfortable with mature passions. Above all, he valued a freewheeling life of the mind and enjoyed the eccentric freedoms that came with being a refugee savant. Love and marriage seemed common threats to this uncommon life on the run.
Szilard had met Trude in Berlin in 1929, and they corresponded and visited each other after she returned to Vienna to study medicine in 1930. During the next few years, she was engaged to two other men but both times ended the relationship in favor of her distant and sporadic friendship with Szilard.6 He seemed to care about her, persuaded her to leave Vienna and join him in England in 1936, and helped her arrange medical study in London and a hospital job in New York.
From the mid-1950s on, when Szila
rd was in his thirties and Trude nine years younger, he treated her in an avuncular manner. Still, beginning with their time together in London, Leo and Trude grew closer. In letters about illness and medical treatments, Leo advised Trude to take hormones as a way to alleviate her anxiety and pain with menstruation— he called it her “brainstorm”—and often explained her mood changes by the strength and frequency of this medication.7
Work kept them separated when Leo and Trude both lived in New York City, from 1938 to 1942, but he came to value their friendship and made a habit of writing her quick notes and calling to check on her. When Szilard moved to Chicago for the Manhattan Project in 1942, his notes and calls increased. He also visited her in New York several times during the war and, whenever he traveled by plane, took out life insurance that named her as beneficiary. Gradually, Trude had become someone Leo could turn to, often at day’s end, to relate his activities, amusements, and anxieties. She, in turn, valued his advice about an array of worries: about how to care for her ailing mother, about decisions in her public-health career, about whether to visit friends for a weekend in the country, about what he thought of a new hat or dress.
As lovers do, they also made up a vocabulary of their own for shared emotions. A “brainstorm” was certainly her period, and no doubt with sex in mind, Szilard at times planned his visits around it. This planning also seemed to involve his concern about emotional outbursts of any kind. As he advised in a July 1943 letter, “If I were in your place I would finish the period of brainstorming with a physiological brainstorm and then adjourn other brainstorms (with one exception) until September. You can say to yourself: ‘God, will I be excited in September!’”8 In their private language, things “ici-pici” were quick, rushed, or slight,9 “kuc-kuc” was weariness or anxiety or a problem,10 and “shush-kush” were more personal, upbeat, and gossipy feelings.11
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