Otto Robert Frisch

Otto Robert Frisch (1904 to 1979) was an Austrian physicist, born in Vienna, who worked on nuclear physics. In the Christmas holiday of 1938 he and his aunt Lise Meitner, having heard that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had found barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons, worked out that the uranium nucleus had split in two. Frisch estimated the energy released and coined the word fission for the process, then went on to give the first direct experimental detection of the fission fragments in Copenhagen. With Rudolf Peierls he wrote the Frisch-Peierls memorandum in 1940, the first document to set out how an atomic explosion could be produced. After the war he headed the nuclear physics division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell and later held a chair at Cambridge. His work on fission opened the road to both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.