Hahn, Otto uranium research

It was first identified and named brevium, meaning brief, by Kasimir Fajans and O. H. Gohring in 1913 because of its extremely short half-life. In 1918 Otto Hahn (1879—1968) and Lise Meitner (1878-1968) independently discovered a new radioactive element that decayed from uranium into (actinium). Other researchers named it uranium X2. It was not until 1918 that researchers were able to identify independently more of the elements properties and declare it as the new element 91 that was then named protactinium. This is another case in which several researchers may have discovered the same element. Some references continue to give credit for protactinium s discovery to Frederich Soddy (1877—1956) and John A. Cranston (dates unknown), as well as to Hahn and Meitner. 

As World War II approached, two German chemists, Fritz Strassmann (1902-1980) and Otto Hahn (1879-1968), pointed a stream of neutrons at a sample of uranium and succeeded in splitting the nuclei of some of its atoms. This splitting of nuclei is termed nuclear fission. The energy released through nuclear fission was the source of power for the first atomic bomb, which was built in the United States by a large team of scientists lead by U.S. physicist J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967). This secret research and development program was termed the Manhattan Project. 

One of the leading research teams looking into the products of bombardment was composed of Otto Hahn (1879-1968), Lise Meitner (1878-1968), and Fritz Strassmann (1902-1980), working in Rerlin. They irradiated uranium with... 

Three researchers in Germany— Lise Meitner (1878-1968), Fritz Strassmann (1902-1980), and Otto Hahn (1879-1968)— repeated Fermi s experiments, and then performed careful chemical analysis of the products. What they found in the products— several elements lighter than uranium—would change the world forever. On January 6, 1939, Meitner, Strassmann, and Hahn reported that the neutron bombardment of uranium resulted in nuclear fission—the splitting of the uranium atom. The nucleus of the neutron-bombarded uranium atom had been split into barium, krypton, and other smaller products. They also determined that the process emits enormous amounts of energy. A nuclear equation for a fission reaction, showing how uranium breaks apart into the daughter nuclides, is shown here. 

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