MEITNER, Lise; FRISCH, Otto; BOHR, Niels; HALBAN, Hans von; JOLIOT, Frédéric; KOWARSKI, Lew; ADLER, Frédéric; & FEATHER, Norman.

(1) MEITNER & FRISCH, ‘Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: a New Type of Nuclear Reaction,’ pp. 239-240, in Vol. 143, No. 3615, 11 February 1939 [PMM 422b]; (2) FRISCH, ‘Physical Evidence for the Division of Heavy Nuclei under Neutron Bombardment,’ p. 276, in No. 3616, 18 February [PMM 422c]; (3) BOHR, ‘Disintegration of Heavy Nuclei,’ p. 330, in No. 3617, 25 February; (4) HALBAN, JOLIOT & KOWARSKI, ‘Liberation of Neutrons in the Nuclear Explosion of Uranium,’ pp. 470-471 [PMM 422d], with MEITNER & FRISCH, ‘Products of the Fission of the Uranium Nucleus,’ pp. 471-472, both in No. 3620, 18 March;(5) HALBAN, JOLIOT & KOWARSKI, ‘Number of Neutrons Liberated in the Nuclear Fission of Uranium,’ p. 680, in No. 3625, 22 April; (6) ADLER & HALBAN, ‘Nuclear Physics: Control of the Chain Reaction Involved in Fission of the Uranium Nucleus,’ pp. 793-794, in No. 3628, 13 May; (7) FEATHER, ‘Fission of Heavy Nuclei: a New Type of Nuclear Disintegration,’ pp. 877-879, in No. 3630, 27 May; (8) HALBAN, JOLIOT & KOWARSKI, ‘Energy of Neutrons Liberated in the Nuclear Fission of Uranium Induced by Thermal Neutrons,’ p. 939, in No. 3631, 3 June 1939.

London: Macmillan, 1939.

First edition, rare, journal issues in the original printed wrappers, of the complete sequence of papers in Nature by which nuclear fission was reported, theoretically interpreted, experimentally verified, and shown to liberate enough secondary neutrons to sustain a chain reaction—the sequence that, between 11 February and 3 June 1939, took physics from a chemical anomaly observed in Berlin to the certainty of a feasible nuclear bomb. Three of the eight issues offered here contain Printing and the Mind of Man entries (422b, the discovery and naming of fission; 422c, its experimental confirmation; 422d, the demonstration of neutron multiplication); the remaining five are the immediately surrounding papers without which the PMM trio cannot be properly read. Together they constitute the entire foundational literature of nuclear fission, in the form in which it first reached the working physicist on his subscriber’s table, and in the four-month window between the Christmas-week calculation of Meitner and Frisch in a Swedish wood and the outbreak of the Second World War in Poland fewer than thirteen weeks after the appearance of the last paper here offered.

The story begins in Berlin in December 1938. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had been bombarding uranium with neutrons since 1934, hoping to produce transuranic elements. Their chemical analyses kept yielding results that made no nuclear-physical sense: among the products, in repeated and unmistakable fashion, was an isotope of barium (Z = 56), an element less than two-thirds the atomic number of uranium (Z = 92). The reigning view of nuclear processes—that a slow neutron could only nudge a heavy nucleus by a unit or two of charge through the emission of α or β particles—made any such large change inconceivable. Hahn, an outstanding radiochemist with no theoretical training, wrote to his former collaborator of thirty years, the physicist Lise Meitner, who had fled Berlin five months earlier as the post-Anschluss racial laws closed in on Jewish scientists, and who was now working in straitened circumstances at Manne Siegbahn’s institute in Stockholm. Meitner read Hahn’s letter on 21 December 1938 and could not at first make sense of the chemistry either, except in the conviction—based on thirty years of joint work—that the chemistry was right.

She read the letter again over the Christmas holiday at Kungälv on the west coast of Sweden, where she was the guest of her old friend Eva von Bahr-Bergius and where she was joined by her thirty-four-year-old nephew Otto Robert Frisch, then a junior researcher at Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen. The two of them went out for a walk in the snow on the morning of Christmas Day—Frisch on skis, Meitner walking briskly alongside—to talk through what could possibly be wrong with Hahn’s analysis, which they were certain was not. They sat down on a tree-trunk in the woods and did the calculation together. Treating the uranium nucleus as a deformable liquid drop, in the model that George Gamow had proposed in 1928 and that Niels Bohr and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker had developed through the middle 1930s, they reasoned that the surface tension that ordinarily held the drop spherical would be largely cancelled by the mutual electrostatic repulsion of the 92 protons in a nucleus as heavy as uranium. The drop should be on the verge of instability with respect to even small deformations. A captured neutron might set it oscillating; the oscillation could elongate it into a dumbbell; the electrostatic repulsion could then drive the two halves apart, with the release of about 200 MeV per nucleus. Where, Frisch asked, would the energy come from? Meitner, working from memory of the empirical mass formula, calculated that the daughter nuclei would together be about one-fifth of a proton-mass lighter than the parent, and that this mass deficit, multiplied by c², gave precisely 200 MeV. The mechanism, the magnitude of the energy, and the chemistry all fitted at once.

Frisch returned to Copenhagen by ferry on 3 January 1939 and went straight to Bohr, who, on hearing the explanation, slapped his forehead and said something to the effect that they had all been idiots not to have seen it. Bohr immediately recognised that the new picture refined rather than refuted his own compound-nucleus theory, and promised not to publish or speak of the result until Meitner and Frisch had submitted their paper. Frisch, in the days that followed, consulted the American biologist William A. Arnold, then visiting Copenhagen, on the term used in microbiology for the division of a single cell into two. The answer was ‘binary fission.’ Frisch shortened it to ‘fission,’ used the noun and the verb throughout his papers and Meitner’s, and within a year the term—coined by analogy with the multiplication of an amoeba—had displaced every alternative in every language of physics.

Bohr boarded the Drottningholm for New York on 7 January 1939 to attend the fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics. He was accompanied by his collaborator Léon Rosenfeld; he had given Frisch and Meitner his word, but appears not to have impressed on Rosenfeld that the news was confidential. Met at the New York pier on 16 January by Enrico Fermi and John Wheeler, the party went down to Princeton, where the regular Monday-evening Physics Journal Club was meeting. Wheeler asked Rosenfeld for any news from Europe; Rosenfeld delivered a complete account of the Meitner-Frisch interpretation. Within days the result was known across the United States, and a mortified Bohr—who had been counting on a discreet interval until the Meitner-Frisch paper appeared—wrote a hurried note to Nature defending the European priority, which is the third paper here offered (‘Disintegration of Heavy Nuclei,’ p. 330 in the 25 February issue). Hahn, when he saw the note, was nettled that Bohr had cited only Meitner and Frisch and only mentioned the Berlin chemists in passing—the first sounding of a priority dispute that would eventually leave Meitner conspicuously absent from the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The first paper offered here, Meitner and Frisch’s two-page note ‘Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: a New Type of Nuclear Reaction’ (11 February 1939, PMM 422b), is the primary publication of the discovery. It contains the application of the liquid-drop model to uranium, the introduction of the term ‘fission’ in the second paragraph, the calculation of 200 MeV per fission event, and the prediction that the fission fragments should be high-energy nuclei travelling in opposite directions, detectable directly by their ionisation. Frisch’s solo follow-up of 18 February (the second paper here offered, PMM 422c)—‘Physical Evidence for the Division of Heavy Nuclei under Neutron Bombardment’—reports the experimental verification: he placed a uranium-coated foil in an ionisation chamber, exposed it to neutrons, and observed pulses of an unprecedented size, corresponding to fission fragments carrying more than 50 MeV. The third Meitner-Frisch paper, ‘Products of the Fission of the Uranium Nucleus’ (18 March, in the same issue as the first Halban-Joliot-Kowarski paper), demonstrates by radiochemical analysis that the products of uranium fission are not transuranic elements—as Hahn and Strassmann had at first tentatively claimed—but lower-Z nuclei consistent with the splitting hypothesis, closing the chemical loop opened by Hahn’s December puzzle.

The fourth, fifth, and eighth papers here offered—the run from Joliot’s group at the Collège de France—are the documents that took fission from a beautiful piece of nuclear physics into a serious geopolitical question. Hans von Halban, Frédéric Joliot, and Lew Kowarski reasoned that since stable nuclei of half the mass of uranium contain proportionally fewer neutrons, a uranium nucleus splitting in two should release several spare neutrons; if those neutrons could induce further fissions in nearby uranium nuclei, a self-sustaining chain reaction was conceivable. Their first paper, ‘Liberation of Neutrons in the Nuclear Explosion of Uranium’ (18 March 1939, PMM 422d), reports the diffusion experiment with uranyl nitrate solution by which they showed that some of the spare neutrons are indeed liberated. The second, ‘Number of Neutrons Liberated in the Nuclear Fission of Uranium’ (22 April, the fifth paper here offered), gives the average number of neutrons released per fission as approximately 3.5—comfortably above the unity needed for a chain reaction; together these two papers, in the words of Printing and the Mind of Man, ‘established the theoretical possibility of a self-perpetuating reaction chain.’ The third, ‘Energy of Neutrons Liberated in the Nuclear Fission of Uranium Induced by Thermal Neutrons’ (3 June, the last paper here offered), shows that the spare neutrons emerge as fast neutrons rather than slow ones, so that for a chain reaction to be sustained in natural uranium the secondary neutrons must be slowed down to thermal energies by a moderator. The Adler-Halban paper of 13 May (the sixth paper) draws the obvious safety implication—that a runaway chain reaction can be controlled by the introduction of a strongly absorbing element such as cadmium—and is in effect the first published proposal of a control rod. Norman Feather’s ‘Fission of Heavy Nuclei’ of 27 May (the seventh paper) is the first comprehensive review of the field for a general scientific readership, written four months into the new physics by one of Cavendish’s senior nuclear experimentalists.

The closeness of these dates to the outbreak of the Second World War—Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, fewer than thirteen weeks after the last paper here offered—was not lost on the participants. Léo Szilárd, who had patented the principle of a neutron-induced chain reaction in 1934, read the Halban-Joliot-Kowarski papers as soon as they appeared, attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the Joliot group to suspend further publication for reasons of secrecy, and in early August 1939, with Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, drafted the letter that Albert Einstein signed and that was hand-delivered to Franklin Roosevelt in October. Frisch himself, by then at Birmingham as a refugee from Bohr’s Copenhagen institute, collaborated with Rudolf Peierls on the March 1940 memorandum that for the first time set out the theoretical case for a uranium-235 bomb of practicable size, and that became the founding document of the British MAUD Committee and, through it, of the Manhattan Project. Of the principal protagonists of the present sequence, Bohr, Frisch, Peierls, Halban, and Kowarski would all in due course work for the Allied bomb; Joliot remained in occupied Paris and was active in the Resistance; Meitner declined every invitation to participate—‘I will have nothing to do with a bomb,’ she replied to one such overture from Los Alamos—and is the rarest of figures in mid-twentieth-century physics, the discoverer of an effect of cataclysmic technological consequence who refused, to the end of her life, any part in its application.

The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Otto Hahn alone for the discovery of nuclear fission. The decision was deferred from 1944 to November 1945 by wartime conditions, by which point Hahn was in Allied detention at Farm Hall in Cambridgeshire with the other interned German atomic scientists, and the announcement reached him there. Meitner was not named on the prize, was not consulted by the Nobel committees, and was never recognised by them for the discovery, despite her central theoretical role and Frisch’s decisive experimental verification both being plainly acknowledged in the open literature from February 1939 onward. The exclusion has since been studied at length, most thoroughly by Ruth Lewin Sime, and is now generally regarded as one of the most consequential errors in the history of the prize. Meitner returned to Berlin only to lecture; she settled in Cambridge in 1960 and died there in 1968. Her epitaph at Bramley, in her nephew Frisch’s wording, reads: ‘A physicist who never lost her humanity.’

Of the principal protagonists, Meitner lived out her remaining decades in Stockholm and then in Cambridge, where she had moved in 1960 to be closer to Frisch and his family; she lectured intermittently in Berlin without ever resettling there, declined every suggestion of returning to a chair at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut or its successor at Mainz, and died at Bramley on 27 October 1968, eight days short of her ninetieth birthday. Posthumous recognition has been substantial. Element 109, first synthesised at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt in 1982, was named meitnerium in 1997, joining curium as one of only two elements in the periodic table named for a woman. The Lise Meitner Laboratory at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (the institutional successor to her old Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut) and the Lise-Meitner-Haus of the Humboldt University on Newtonstraße both commemorate her work, and Ruth Lewin Sime’s 1996 biography Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics, drawing on the Swedish archives at the Royal Library and the Hahn-Meitner Institute papers, established the standard scholarly reconstruction of the Berlin and Stockholm years. Frisch returned from Los Alamos in 1946 to Cambridge as Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy and gave the indispensable insider account of the discovery in his memoir What Little I Remember (Cambridge, 1979). Bohr, evacuated by Mosquito bomber from Sweden to Britain in October 1943, worked briefly at Los Alamos under the cover-name Nicholas Baker before returning to a heroic post-war role in scientific diplomacy and the Open Letter to the United Nations of 1950. Joliot, who remained in occupied Paris and was active in the Resistance, joined the French Communist Party at the Liberation and served as the first High Commissioner of the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique until his removal on political grounds in 1950; Halban, after a wartime sojourn at Cambridge and Chalk River, established the French heavy-water programme at Saclay; Kowarski survived him to become a senior figure at CERN and the leading historical chronicler of the wartime British and Canadian projects.

Issues of Nature from 1939 in the original printed wrappers, unrestored and complete, are uncommon on the market; complete unbroken runs of all eight of the issues comprising the foundational fission sequence—with PMM 422b, 422c, and 422d together with the five immediately surrounding papers—are rare. The overwhelming majority of surviving copies are encountered today bound up in library half-yearly volumes with the printed wrappers discarded, those bound runs being the institutional standard for the major scientific journals across the twentieth century. The advertisements on the wrappers are themselves of incidental documentary value: the W. & J. George / F.E. Becker physical-apparatus advertisement on the front wrapper of No. 3615 is a snapshot of the British educational instrument trade on the eve of war, and the H. Tinsley & Co. and Baird & Tatlock notices preserve the firms’ London addresses (Werndee Hall S.E.25 and Hatton Garden) and the precise pricing of laboratory hardware in the last full British peacetime year. The present run, in original wrappers across the four months in which fission ceased to be a discovery and became a programme, preserves the literature of the discovery in the precise form in which it was read by the small international community of nuclear physicists who recognised what was happening as it happened.

References: PMM 422b, 422c & 422d; Norman 1487; Sime, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (Berkeley, 1996), chapter 10; Maddox, ‘Fateful discovery almost forgotten,’ Nature 337 (16 February 1989), pp. 499-502 [50th-anniversary retrospective]; Frisch, What Little I Remember (Cambridge, 1979); Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1986), chapters 8-9; Stuewer, ‘Bringing the news of fission to America,’ Physics Today 38, no. 10 (October 1985), pp. 49-56.

Eight issues of Nature, Vol. 143 (London: Macmillan, 11 February – 3 June 1939), Nos. 3615, 3616, 3617, 3620, 3625, 3628, 3630, and 3631, containing the nine foundational fission papers. Each issue large 8vo (267 × 192 mm), in the original printed wrappers with advertisements to all four wrapper-faces of every issue; the front wrapper of No. 3615 carries the NIVOC ‘Physical Apparatus for Colleges and Schools’ advertisement of W. & J. George Ltd. / F.E. Becker & Co. (London and Birmingham), the H. Tinsley & Co. ‘Precision Switch Bridges’ notice (Wheatstone Bridge Type 3352 at £75 18s 0d, Werndee Hall, London S.E.25), and the B.T.L. Photoelectric Turbidimeter of Baird & Tatlock (London) Ltd., 14–17 St Cross Street, Hatton Garden. Wrappers variably toned, with occasional short marginal tears and light chipping at the spine edges, particularly to the earlier issues; small traces of former sewing or stab-holes at the inner margins where the issues have at some point been detached from a binder. Text blocks clean, bright, and complete, the Meitner–Frisch, Frisch, Bohr, Halban–Joliot–Kowarski, Adler–Halban, and Feather papers all appearing at their listed paginations in the Letters to the Editor section of each issue. Housed together in a custom grey-paper folding case with a printed paper label to the front board identifying each of the nine papers by author, short-title, issue, and date, and a second printed spine label giving the author-string and the line ‘Nine papers in Nature v. 143 (1939) on the discovery of fission’.

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Item #6687

Price: $7,500.00