People
ENRICO FERMI
(Physicist, Columbia, Met Lab, and Associate Director at Los Alamos)
People > Scientists
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy, on September 29, 1901. He earned a scholarship to the University of Pisa and completed a Ph.D. in physics by 1922. Shortly thereafter, Fermi studied in Göttingen, Germany, under Max Born, where Robert Oppenheimer would earn his Ph.D. in 1927. From Göttingen, Fermi took a fellowship to study in Leyden in the Netherlands with Paul Ehrenfest, and in 1924 he returned to Italy to take a position teaching physics. At the University of Rome, Fermi eventually rose to become Professor of Theoretical Physics. In Italy during the 1930s, Fermi conducted experiments involving the bombardment of various elements with slow neutrons, inducing radioactivity in many of these substances. Fermi also did important theoretical work on the problem of beta decay. For his achievements he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1938. He used the trip to Stockholm, Sweden for the Nobel Prize award ceremony as the means of escape for him and his wife, who was Jewish, from fascist Italy. From Stockholm he boarded the S. S. Franconia and arrived in New York City on January 2, 1939, where he assumed a professorship in physics at Columbia University. 
Once in America, Fermi almost immediately was drawn into the uranium research that would become the Manhattan Project. When the Danish Physicist Niels Bohr arrived in New York just two weeks after Fermi, he brought news of the discovery of fission, and Fermi, working with John Dunning and younger collaborators at Columbia, soon confirmed the findings. On January 26, Bohr and Fermi at the Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical physics announced the exciting developments abroad. On March 17, Fermi briefed representatives of the Navy and Army in the first, albeit largely unsuccessful, effort to elicit government support. Fermi and his fellow scientists at Columbia, meanwhile, set out to determine through experimentation if a chain reaction in uranium was possible that could be used to produce power or, less likely, an enormous explosion. They determined by spring 1940 that the uranium-235 isotope and not the more abundant uranium-238 fissioned with slow neutrons. Separating out uranium-235 for use in a bomb, however, would be extremely difficult, and not until mid-1941 was it determined that the isotope was fissionable with the fast neutrons that would be necessary for a successful explosion. Fermi's work focused on constructing a "pile" containing natural uranium surrounded by graphite that could slow down, or moderate, the neutrons coming from the fission reaction, increasing the probability of their causing additional fissions in sustaining the chain reaction. The discovery of plutonium by the chemist Glenn Seaborg in early 1941 enhanced the importance of Fermi's pile efforts. Even more likely to fission that uranium-235, Plutonium could be produced in a chain-reacting pile and would be less difficult to separate and concentrate, thus providing a possible second, easier route to a bomb. Fermi's pile research at Columbia by early 1942 had made great strides but still had not produced a sustaining chain reaction. In April, Arthur Compton, who had been placed in charge of plutonium production research, summoned Fermi to the newly formed Met Lab at the University of Chicago. There, under the abandoned west stands of the university's Stagg Field football stadium, Fermi put together CP-1 (Chicago Pile #1). On December 2, CP-1 produced the world's first sustained chain reaction. For the first time in history, humans had unleashed and controlled the power of the atom. A report was quickly dispatched to General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Engineer District, and Compton gave James Conant, director of the National Defense Research Committee, a call to tell him of their success. "Jim," Compton said to Conant, "you'll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has landed in the New World." "Were the natives friendly?" asked Conant. "Everyone landed safe and happy," was the reply. The physicist Leo Szilard had a somewhat different take. He lingered until most people had left, then turned to Fermi, shook his hand, and said that he thought the day would go down as a "black day in the history of mankind." As director of research at the Met Lab, Fermi focused on the development of the follow-up experimental reactors at the Met Lab, CP-2 and CP-3, and the design and construction of plutonium producing reactors. He was present for the start-up of the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge in October 1943. He inserted the first uranium slug in the B Reactor at Hanford and was present when the reactor went critical on September 27, 1944. Fermi also became increasingly involved with the Los Alamos laboratory and the design and development of the bomb itself. Fermi took part in the opening conferences in April 1943 at the new lab, discussing the pile and its uses, and contributed substantially to the lab plans for physical investigations. Oppenheimer, director at the lab, made Fermi, an on and off visitor at Los Alamos, an associate director in July 1944 overseeing the research and theoretical divisions and all nuclear physics problems. When he came to stay for the duration in September, Oppenheimer put him in charge of the new F-Division (named after Fermi) that consolidated several miscellaneous research projects, including the Water Boiler reactor and work on the thermonuclear device, the Super. Fermi also was present at the Trinity test, where Groves became "a bit annoyed" when Fermi jokingly offered to wager "on whether [the Gadget] would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would destroy New Mexico or destroy the world." 
Fermi remained at Los Alamos until 1946, when the University of Chicago created an Institute for Nuclear Studies and offered Fermi a position as professor. Fermi had become a U.S. citizen during the war, and he remained active in post-war nuclear energy research and policies as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee. He died of cancer on November 28, 1954, at the age of 53. In addition to his Nobel Prize, Fermi was the recipient of numerous other honors both during and after his lifetime. The Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, is named in his honor, as is Fermium, the element of atomic number 100.
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The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources. Major sources consulted include the following. Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946: Volume I, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), 10-15, 22-23, 27-29, 34, 48, 54-56, 68-70, 88-89, 111-12, 211, 304-5, 312, 648; Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield, 1947-1952: Volume II, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), 15-16; Lillian Hoddeson, et. al. Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 204, 245-46. Compton/Conant exchange in Arthur M. Compton, Atomic Quest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 144. Szilard quote in Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard, eds., Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts (MIT Press, 1978), 146. Groves's recollection of Fermi's comments at Trinity appears in Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: the Story of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 296-97. For a briefs biography of Fermi and his Nobel lecture, see http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1938/fermi-bio.html. Other books with useful discussions of Fermi's career and contributions to the Manhattan Project appear in Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry Holt, 2002); Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2005). The top portrait of Fermi is courtesy the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as is the image from his wartime security badge. The copy of Fermi's INS certificate is courtesy the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). A digital copy is available on NARA's Archival Research Catalog. It is titled Certificate of Arrival, Number 2 648961, for Enrico Fermi, 06/07/1939, and is designated by ARC identifier 281851. The image of the Fermi stamp is courtesy the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.