by Craig Nelson
The mysteries of Budapest. While working at the University of Chicago, Fermi brought up the question now known as the Fermi paradox: Why hadn’t alien life-forms noticed a planet as beautiful as our earth? “They should have arrived here by now. So, where are they?” he asked. Szilard retorted, “They are among us. But they call themselves Hungarians.” This was a twist on a famous assertion of von Kármán’s, that the reason so many natives of Pest—which means “furnace”—became internationally acclaimed scientists was that they were Martians (he included Zsa Zsa Gabor in this extraterrestrial cotillion). Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam: “Johnny [von Neumann] used to say that it was a coincidence of some cultural factors which he could not make precise: an external pressure on the whole society of this part of Central Europe, a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or else face extinction.” Additionally, there is an old Pest saying that if you enter a revolving door with a Hungarian behind you, by the time you come out, he’ll be in front of you.
The mysteries of Budapest. After the Hapsburgs tried to conquer Hungary, failed, and needed to beg for military help from Russia, they had so much trouble governing their new province that they had to promote it to equality, creating an Austro-Hungarian empire under Franz Joseph I, with Vienna and Budapest as co-capitals. The government then pressed forward with immense liberalizations, which made the nation the second-most-popular destination for the 2 million Jews fleeing czarist Russian pogroms and anti-Jewish rioting in the Pale of Settlement (Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania). Budapest became nineteenth-century Europe’s fastest-growing city, and within two decades the first generation of itinerant farmer and peddler émigrés begat descendants who created a vibrant, educated, cosmopolitan, professional, Yiddish-speaking class of doctors, lawyers, and storekeepers, becoming a fifth of Budapest’s population. By the turn of the century, the city was a belle epoque jewel, with the largest parliament building in the world, the first European subway (horse-drawn, and then electric), the largest single-span bridge on earth, and a plethora of first-class hotels, electric trolleys, and plate-glass windows. Like Weimar Berlin—where many of these Martians would initially prosper—Buda and Pest were politically chaotic, with two revolutions in 1918–19, the incompetent Communist rule of Bela Kun, two years of White Terror focused against Communists and Jews, the loss of a war with Romania and Romanian occupation, and the ascent of the Hungarian Mussolini, Miklós Horthy (the grotesqueries of the Nazi and Soviet occupations have been memorialized in one of the world’s most remarkable museums, the House of Terror). For decades, Berlin and Budapest were as alike and not as sisters: tough but warm; cosmopolitan but spiritual; perfectionist yet tolerant; and just a little too aware of their role in history. To this day, even after five decades of Soviet brutality and incompetence, the Hungarian capital easily competes with Paris and Vienna in its sophistication, beauty, and urban grace.
The men who would become America’s Hungarian Quartet all came from Budapest’s newly Jewish upper-middle class, but all of them save Teller had, like Szilard, nominally converted to Christianity. They did not follow Judaism as a religion or as an ethnic identity, but they would follow its culture and traditions. Though lifelong friends from college, they retained Magyar formalities, calling each other by surnames and often including the ur, meaning “master.” That formality extended to their attire; as adults, both von Neumann and Szilard always wore suits and ties, even, most notoriously, when hiking in the deserts of New Mexico.
Each of the Quartet emigrated from Hungary to Germany, globally renowned for its science education and research—the teenaged Enrico Fermi’s having been forced by his mentor to learn German was one sign of the country’s prominence—with Teller going to Leipzig under Werner Heisenberg, von Kármán to Göttingen, and Szilard, Wigner, and von Neumann to Berlin (their fellow Austro-Hungarian in America Isidor Isaac Rabi emigrated to the Lower East Side of New York as an infant and became Columbia University’s first Jewish professor). In Berlin, Leo became famous as “an intellectual bumblebee.” His brain spewed a torrent of notions. Some friends believed that had he pursued all his ideas in the real world, today he’d be spoken of in the same breath as Thomas Edison. On Szilard, Rabi would say, “You didn’t know what he was up to. He was always a bit mysterious.” One chum nicknamed him “the inventor of all things,” while Gene Wigner concluded, “I never met anybody more imaginative than Leo Szilard. No one had more independence of thought and opinion. You may value this statement better if you recall that I knew Albert Einstein as well.” Szilard designed an electron microscope, a low-fat cheese (being a man constantly trying to lose weight), and the basis of the cyclotron. Leo Szilard: “I believe that many children are born with an inquisitive mind, the mind of a scientist, and I assume that I became a scientist because in some ways I remained a child.”
For most of his life, Leo’s friends would have terrible problems telling when he was serious and when he was kidding. Yet this childlike sense would be shared with Einstein, with whom Szilard would become extremely close. Each Wednesday, Einstein and his wife had students to their home for tea and pastries, and starting in 1920, Szilard attended religiously. Both men were notably shy, except with each other, and became so friendly that Einstein tried to talk Szilard into working as a patent clerk, since that’s what Einstein did to earn a living while creating the greatest of his theories: “When I worked in the patent office, that was my best time of all.” Both became enamored of Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch lensmaker and philosopher, with Einstein explaining 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.”
As an adult, Szilard began almost every morning with breakfast and the newspapers in a café, then returned to his quarters to soak in a bathtub for up to three hours and think without distraction . . . suddenly leaping out, soaking wet, to jot down notes on a yellow legal pad. Scientists studying creativity have recently uncovered why this strategy produces results—when a problem is mulled again and again, frequently the inspired solution arises after a serious break from concentration, whether with a long walk or a good soak.
When Szilard saw a newspaper story that a family had died from a leak in their refrigerator’s coolant, he and Einstein wanted to prevent that tragedy from ever happening again. They wondered if the body’s method of circulation could be applied to refrigerators, and designed an electromagnetic pump that circulated liquid-metal coolant. This would never be as popular in home kitchens as General Electric’s design of motor and coils, but it would become a fixture in the first generation of atomic breeder reactors.
Szilard’s close friendship with Einstein would not lead to any jobs—mostly because Szilard couldn’t settle on just what kind of job he should be doing—but it did result in letters of support for American visas, saying that Szilard was a dear colleague carrying out “work in which I myself have an interest.” Szilard would eventually make a tidy income from certain of his twenty-nine German patents, including a mercury-vapor lamp, and the Szilard-Einstein refrigerator pump, which alone led to eight joint patents. Of him, Einstein said, “He tends to overestimate the role of rational thought in human life.”
Beginning in 1923, Leo regularly dropped by for visits at the world’s premier scientific research facility, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where he interrupted the scientists in their labs to ask questions, often explaining why they were wrong, and suggesting entirely new avenues for them to pursue. Besides his lack of professional courtesy, Leo was widely disliked by fellow scientists for his vigor and speed in applying for patents, which he thought was his only course of guaranteeing an income, but which many found selfish and contrary to the hive-mind keystone of the modern scientific method. He was obnoxious, rude, haughty, and staggeringly offensive, yet so often right and inspiring that he was made a Generaldirektor, teaching nuclear physics and chemis
try with Germany’s Marie Curie, Lise Meitner. In 1925, he was promoted to the choice spot of being von Laue’s assistant—Max von Laue had won his Nobel for showing how X-rays could be focused with crystals. Now Leo lived his dream life as a flaneur, soaking in his tub, smoking and drinking in cafés, then wandering the streets of the Eden that was Weimar Berlin, frequently with Dennis Gabor, to whom he proposed a method for uniting the bloodstreams of an old dog and a young dog to create a supercanine that would live forever.
Over Easter holiday in England in 1929, Leo’s dinner companion was a man who would write over a hundred books from 1895 to 1946 and who was globally famous for what he called his “scientific romances”—today known as science fiction—H. G. Wells. In nearly all of his books, Wells showed how humanity could improve itself through the application of science, and in his spare time, he proselytized for free thought, free speech, and the end of war through world government, working to launch both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Wells also thought the human species would be greatly improved through a vast and calculated program of eugenics.
Three years after their dinner, Szilard read Wells’s The World Set Free, in which, Leo reported, the author “proceeds to describe the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale for industrial purposes, and the development of atomic bombs, and a world war which was apparently fought by an alliance of England, France, and perhaps including America, against Germany and Austria [in which] the major cities of the world are all destroyed by atomic bombs.” Just as rocket science had begun with Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and von Braun inspired to their life’s work from reading Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, so nuclear power and weaponry would be triggered by Szilard’s infatuation with this 1914 science-fiction novel.
Written in Switzerland at the dawn of World War I, The World Set Free describes a radium-like material, carolinum, which scientists use as the basis for what Wells called, for the first time, an atomic bomb. Wells had originally been inspired by Frederick Soddy’s Interpretation of Radium, which predicted that such a bomb could be made to destroy the earth, but that the same amount of fuel could also generate enough power to light the lamps of London for a year. The World Set Free is not very good and has never been all that popular, but it is easily the most historically significant book H. G. Wells ever wrote because of the effect it had on one reader: Leo Szilard. Years after the Manhattan Project had completed its work, when Szilard was asked who the father of nuclear weapons was, he would always reply: H. G. Wells.
When Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933, Szilard told his Budapest relatives, “Hitler and his Nazis are going to take over Europe. Get out now.” But he himself didn’t, even though Wigner and von Neumann had left for Princeton three years before. Then on March 27, Reich minister for people’s enlightenment and propaganda Joseph Goebbels announced a boycott of Jewish businesses and a limit on Jews entering universities and law and medical schools to their ratio of the population—1 percent. The next day, Einstein announced from Belgium he would not return to Germany until such anti-Semitic measures were ended, and two days later Szilard packed his things and took the train to Vienna. The following day when the anti-Jewish laws began being enforced in earnest, “non-Aryans” were refused exits at the Czech border and their valuables were confiscated. But Szilard had been blessed with perfect timing and had no trouble. He and Bela then rode to Switzerland to safeguard the family’s savings and returned to Vienna to monitor the situation.
Through friends of friends, Leo then met London School of Economics director Sir William Beveridge, who agreed that a refugee effort for Germany’s displaced Jewish scientists needed to be created, and who encouraged Szilard to come to London to “prod” Beveridge into it. On April 7, just four days before all Jews were removed from civil service, Szilard moved to Russell Square to organize the Academic Assistance Council, which rescued more than twenty-five hundred exiles over the next six years (and still exists today as the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning). As for Szilard himself, “practically everybody who came to England had a position, except me.” His sole income? Refrigerator patents. While working so hard to help others professionally, he continued to dither about his own future, unable to decide whether to go to America, to India, or to remain in England. In a letter dated August 11, 1933, Szilard said, “I’m spending much money at present for traveling about and earn of course nothing and cannot possibly go on with this for very long. At the moment, however, I can be so useful that I cannot afford to retire into private life.”
On September 13, Leo was walking the streets of London as he always did, in an absentminded haze, a man neither here, nor there, pondering Wells, Hitler, and especially Ernest Rutherford’s pronouncement in the Times the day before that “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine.” Nothing bothered Szilard more than hearing a scientist claim something to be impossible if that impossibility hadn’t categorically been proven.
On Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, “as I was waiting for the light to change and as the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction. I didn’t see at the moment just how one would go about finding such an element, or what experiments would be needed, but the idea never left me. In certain circumstances it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs. The thought that this might be in fact possible became sort of an obsession with me.”
On June 4, 1934, Szilard met with Rutherford about a possible slot at his Cavendish Laboratory. He wanted to conduct experiments proving or disproving the chain-reaction theory, and thinking it would help, he described what these experiments might be based on what Rutherford and his associates had achieved with alpha particles, instead of on the neutrons he himself envisioned. Rutherford immediately saw the limits of using alphas, and when Szilard then explained he’d taken out a patent on the whole notion, the Hungarian became the sole visitor that the New Zealand émigré physicist ever threw out of his Cambridge office. But the world is very, very small, and in time Rutherford would become president of Szilard’s Academic Assistance Council.
Leo meanwhile remained so obsessed with the promise of a neutron-triggered chain reaction that he spurned all his friends and social life to soak in the tub, leaving his room only to eat. After running through calculation after calculation, he finally had an answer, winning a British patent on March 12, 1934, for a method of inducing a reaction with beryllium (it would turn out that an incorrect assessment of the element’s atomic weight misled him on its nuclear potential), as well as uranium and thorium (the only two elements in nature that can in fact chain-react). He also applied for a patent to reduce libraries to images on a roll of film viewable by a “microbook,” not knowing that German industrial giant Siemens had already patented their own “microfilm.” But the only place in England where he was allowed to do research was at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, working with medical radium, where he and St. Bart’s Thomas Chalmers discovered a new method of producing isotopes.
After donating his beryllium reactor patent to the British navy in the autumn of 1935, Leo decided to carry out an experiment completely on his own—the only time in his life this would happen—using gamma rays from radon gas to release slow neutrons from beryllium, which were corralled through a sixteen-inch tube of paraffin and then absorbed by sheets of cadmium or indium (a soft metal with a sheen like mercury, but made from zinc). He became so devoted to this investigation that everywhere he went he carried two black leather satchels, one for clothes and papers, the other for a Geiger counter, wax, metal foils, boxes, and tubes—the apparatuses of his experiment. He found on November 14, 1935, that “residual” neutrons, those not absorbe
d by the sheets, were affected very differently by cadmium and indium, and his results, published in Nature, won acclaim from Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Wigner, and Fermi. Finally, Szilard was being taken seriously by the nuclear community, so much so that Joliot-Curie offered him a position at their Radium Institute. His isotope-separation patents developed at St. Bart’s would give him $14,000 that year, his first income since leaving Germany. But after the Nazis occupied the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, and England did nothing to refute them, Szilard decided Hitler was unstoppable and that he had to flee the Continent.
On Christmas Eve 1937, he sailed on RMS Franconia, arriving in New York on January 2, 1938, and moving into the nine-story King’s Crown. His inamorata, Dr. Trude Weiss—a woman with the stolid character of a Paleolithic Venus—had arrived a few weeks before and was working in the emergency room at Bellevue. Szilard quickly met Lewis Strauss, a Wall Street financier whose parents had recently died of cancer, and with whom he experimented on artificially irradiated cobalt. Strauss pulled strings to get Leo’s brother through the immigration quota after Hitler annexed Austria with Bela in Vienna; then, when Bela arrived in the United States, he chose a surname spelling of Silard, so at least Americans would pronounce it correctly. Leo then worked with Sidney Barnes and the University of Rochester’s cyclotron to see if indium would shed extra neutrons depending on what hit it: neutrons, protons, or electrons. “I don’t remember him ever sitting down,” Sidney said. “If I had anything to say, I just waited until he stopped for breath, and I’d get it in. I generally didn’t say much, though.”