Lise Meitner

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The True Discoverer of Nuclear Fission

The success of the recent blockbuster Oppenheimer movie has prompted many observers to point out a critical failing in the film. Neither the 2023 film nor the 2005 book it’s based on ever mentions the name of the Austrian theoretical physicist Lise Meitner, the woman who played a vital role in the discovery of nuclear fission, and even coined the term “fission” along with her physicist nephew Otto Robert Frisch.

Meitner probably would have no objection to her omission. Despite being invited, she adamantly refused to participate in the Manhattan Project or to have anything to do with the creation of the atomic bomb. (Her friend Albert Einstein also refused. Her nephew Frisch did participate.) The woman who ironically has been dubbed the “mother of the atomic bomb” was nominated 49 times for the Nobel Prize (19 times for chemistry; 30 times for physics)*, an honor she never won. In fact most of her scientific recognition and honors came only after her death in 1968 at the age of 89. One example is the chemical element 109, which was named meitnerium in 1997.

The fact that Meitner never became a Nobel Laureate for her groundbreaking physics work is a black mark for the scientific community and the Nobel organization. Unfortunately she had two major disadvantages: She was a woman and she was Jewish.

Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner 1912

Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in their Berlin laboratory in 1912. They were almost the same age and died in the same year. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Elise “Lise” Meitner (1878-1968)
Lise Meitner was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary to a prosperous Jewish family on 7 November 1878. (Some sources claim 17 November, but Lise (LEE-ZUH) and her family always celebrated her birthday on the 7th. That date is also the birthday of Madame Curie, Lise Meitner’s idol.) Her birth took place at the family’s home in the apartment building at Kaiser-Joseph-Straße 27 (now Heinestraße 27, 1020 Wien) in the Volkertviertel (Volkert Quarter) of Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district. Lise was the third of eight children born to the attorney and chess master Philipp Meitner and his wife Hedwig (née Skovran).

Meitner’s parents had come to Vienna from the Jewish quarter of the Moravian town of Hranice, then part of Austria-Hungary, now in the eastern part of the Czech Republic. They were married in Vienna in 1875. Accounts vary, but the family seems to have lived in the Jewish community, but were not very religiously observant. In any case, as adults, Lise and two of her sisters converted to Christianity, Lise as a Protestant, and her sisters as Catholics, all in 1908. That of course would not protect them from later Nazi persecution.

Lise’s father believed in education for his daughters as well as his sons. He even hired private tutors in some cases. Lise first attended a so-called Bürgerschule in Vienna because at that time girls were not allowed at the more academic Gymnasium. After graduation, Lise’s father encouraged her to obtain a teacher’s license for French, which she did. (It was one of the view professions open to women at the time.) After 1899 she studied on her own in order to obtain a full secondary diploma (Reifeprüfung) in 1901 from Vienna’s Akademisches Gymnasium. In 1901 Meitner was one of only four girls out of 14 to pass the special exam. It meant she could now attend university.

A Doctorate Degree from the University of Vienna
In October 1901 Meitner enrolled in the University of Vienna’s doctoral studies program. (This was at a time when many universities still refused to accept women. No universities in neighboring Prussia then admitted females.) Technically Meitner was enrolled in the School of Philosophy, but from the beginning she attended lectures on physics, calculus, chemistry, and botany. Early on she developed an interest in radioactivity. One of her favorite professors was the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann.

Meitner submitted her thesis (Prüfung einer Formel Maxwells/”Examination of a Maxwell Formula”) in November 1905. She had her oral exam (under Boltzmann and Franz Exner) in December and was awarded her doctorate on 1 February 1906. She was only the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna. Her thesis was published on 22 February 1906.

Now that she had her doctorate, Paul Ehrenfest (1880-1933), an Austrian theoretical physicist who had a Moravian background similar to that of Meitner, asked her to investigate an article on optics by Lord Rayleigh that detailed an experiment that produced results that the British physicist had been unable to explain. Not only did she explain what was going on, she also made predictions based on that explanation, and then verified them experimentally, demonstrating her ability to carry out solid research on her own.

From Vienna to Berlin: Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität
The next stage of Lise Meitner’s studies and research took place in Germany. With her father’s financial support, Meitner next went to Berlin and the Friedrich Wilhelm University (today’s Humboldt University), attracted by the renowned German physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) who taught there. Planck was “old school” regarding women attending university, but he saw something special in Meitner and made an exception for her. Not only did he allow her to attend his lectures, but he also invited her to his home. Meitner became good friends with his twin daughters Emma and Grete.

Otto Hahn (1879-1968)
It was in Berlin where Meitner met the man she would later collaborate with for decades, the German chemist Otto Hahn. He was also the man who, despite many years of true friendship, would betray her after she was forced to leave Germany in 1938.

Hahn and Meitner were almost the same age, with Meitner born in 1878 and Hahn in 1879. (They both died in the same year, 1968.) In 1906 Hahn had returned to Berlin from London and Montreal, where he had been working with radioactive elements and isotopes. He continued his work in Berlin, discovering new radioactive elements (radium-228, thorium-230). In September 1907 Hahn and Meitner met at a colloquium at the Physics Institute. She needed a place to do her physics work.

Hahn had worked with women in Canada, and had developed an informal “Anglicized Berliner” manner that some Germans found too informal. He agreed to allow Meitner to work in the wood shop, which had a separate entrance. As a female, she was not allowed to enter the main Institute building, including Hahn’s upstairs lab. To go to the toilet, Meitner had to walk to a nearby restaurant, as there were no facilities in her building. It was just another example of the typical sex discrimination in academia at the time. A year later, the anti-female policy changed, and female toilets were installed at the Institute.

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Chemie
Amazingly, until 1912 both Hahn and Meitner were working unpaid, dependent on financial support from their families. During their first years of working together they co-authored three papers in 1908, and six more in 1909.

In 1912 Otto Hahn accepted an offer to become the junior assistant in charge of the radiochemistry section of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Chemistry. It was a paid position that came with the title of professor. Meitner was now able to move out of her old wood shop to far better facilities at KWI. A few months later, Hahn also granted Meitner a paid position as the first female scientific assistant in all of Prussia. In 1913 she became a Mitglied (associate), the same rank as Hahn. (Of course, as a woman, her salary was still less.) But Meitner could enjoy a new honor: the KWI radioactivity section became the Hahn-Meitner Laboratory.

In 1914, no less a figure than Max Planck insisted that Meitner should get a raise. Planck did not want to lose her. (Planck later nominated Meitner seven times for the Nobel Prize.) He feared she might accept a better offer from Prague. Meitner’s salary was doubled, though it was still less than Hahn’s. However, the total of their two salaries was soon greatly exceeded by the royalties that Hahn was earning from the sales of mesothorium (radium-228, also called “German radium”) produced for medical purposes, for which Hahn received 66,000 marks in 1914. He was good enough to share ten percent with Meitner.

1914: War Arrives
A month before the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Hahn had been called to active duty in the Prussian army. Meitner continued to work in Berlin finishing experiments that had not been completed. But, with the war in mind, she also trained to become an X-ray technician, and took a course in anatomy. In July 1915 she returned to Austria to join the Austrian Army as an X-ray nurse-technician. She was soon deployed to the front in Poland, and she later served in Italy before her discharge in September 1916.

In October she returned to Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where she was virtually alone, as most of the men were now in the army. She was appointed the head of her own physics section in January. (Hahn was a chemist.) The Hahn-Meitner Laboratory was now divided into separate Hahn and Meitner Laboratories, and her pay was increased to 4,000 marks. Hahn briefly returned to Berlin on leave, and he and Meitner discussed completing earlier work on isotope research. But Meitner was soon alone again, and had to do all the work herself. Not only that, wartime restrictions made it difficult for her to obtain the pitchblende, a uranium residue, that she needed for her lab work. Despite such difficulties, and with help from other scientists, Meitner carried out some pioneering work related to the element protactinium (Pa, atomic number 91). Although others had also been working on identifying Pa, they acknowledged Meitner’s priority. (It would be 1929 before the mother isotope, uranium-235, was discovered.)

Lise Meitner in Copenhagen in 1937

At a conference in Copenhagen in 1937, Meitner is in the front row: (left to right) Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Otto Stern, Lise Meitner, and Rudolf Ladenburg. Can you find the only other woman in the room? The German-Danish physicist Hilde Levi (1909-2003) is on the left in the very last row. PHOTO: Friedrich Hund, CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Visit to Sweden
In 1921 the Swedish physicist Manne Siegbahn invited Meitner to come to Sweden and give a series of lectures on radioactivity as a visiting professor at Lund University. Meitner was interested in learning more about X-ray spectroscopy, which was Siegbahn’s specialty. With the knowledge she gained in Sweden, Meitner was able to discover the cause of the emission of electrons from surfaces of atoms with “signature” energies, now known as the Auger effect, named after the French physicist Pierre Victor Auger, who independently discovered it in 1923.

The Nazis Come to Power
In April 1933 Germany’s new Nazi government passed the antisemitic Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which removed Jews from the civil service, including academia. At first Meitner, as an Austrian citizen, was exempt from that law. But on 6 September 1933, she was dismissed from her adjunct professorship on weak, made-up grounds. This had no effect on her salary or work at the KWI, but it was a warning shot that Meitner later regretted ignoring. She allowed her love of her work in Berlin to cloud her judgment.

She knew other Jewish academics, including her nephew Otto Frisch, who lost their jobs because of the 1933 law. Frisch lost his post at the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the University of Hamburg. Even Otto Stern, the Institute’s director, was dismissed. Stern later helped Frisch get a new job in England, while he himself went to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where he remained until 1939.

Meitner would later admit that it was a big mistake for her to remain in Germany as long as she did after the Nazis came to power. When she was finally forced to flee Germany following the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, she faced major problems and real danger. She almost did not make it out.

Transuranium Brings Hahn and Meitner Together Again
After Chadwick had discovered the neutron in 1932, Enrico Fermi and others began irradiating elements with neutrons in an effort to make new discoveries. This also piqued Meitner’s interest, but Hahn wasn’t very eager – until the German nuclear chemist Aristid von Grosse, who had earlier worked with Hahn, told him that what Fermi had found was an isotope of protactinium.

Although they had not collaborated for a few years, in May 1937 Hahn and Meitner issued parallel reports in separate journals, one with a physics focus, with Meitner as the first author, and one with a chemical focus, with Hahn as the first author. The conclusions of the two reports were very different. Hahn was certain, stating about the transuranic elements: “Their chemical distinction from all previously known elements needs no further discussion.”

Meitner, on the other hand, was still skeptical. She wrote: “The process must be neutron capture by uranium-238, which leads to three isomeric nuclei of uranium-239. This result is very difficult to reconcile with current concepts of the nucleus.” In the end she was right to be skeptical. Later science would prove that Hahn was wrong.

Meitner Loses Her Austrian Citizenship
Germany’s annexation of Austria (der Anschluss) on 12 March 1938 meant that Meitner now lost her Austrian citizenship. There was no longer a separate nation called Austria. She quickly got offers from Niels Bohr to go to Denmark, and from the Swiss physicist Paul Scherrer to attend a conference in Switzerland, all expenses paid. The only problem was that by the time she decided to accept Bohr’s offer in May, she was unable to get a travel visa. She had an invalid Austrian passport. She could not go anywhere.

Book: Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics

One of the best Meitner bios is Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime (paperback, Kindle from Amazon.com). See more books about Meitner below.

Desperate Measures: Escape
Now desperate, Meitner looked at possible alternatives. In July it only got worse. Academics would no longer be granted permission to travel abroad. Period. It was now time for extraordinary measures. A plot was hatched to get Meitner out of Germany. To his credit, Otto Hahn was one of the people who helped in this illegal endeavor. With help from the Dutch physicists Dirk Coster and Adriaan Fokker, they would smuggle Meitner out of Germany to the Netherlands by rail.

Once she was in the Netherlands, she would have travel options that were impossible from Germany. On 11 July, Coster arrived in Berlin and stayed with a friend. The following morning, Meitner arrived early at the Institute, where Hahn briefed her on the plan. To avoid suspicion, she maintained her usual routine, remaining at the institute until 8:00 pm correcting papers for an associate. She packed two small suitcases, filled only with summer clothes. Hahn gave her a diamond ring he had inherited from his mother, in case of emergency. Meitner took only 10 marks in her purse. She then spent the night at Hahn’s house.

The next day Meitner met Coster at the train station, where they pretended to have met each other by chance. They traveled on a lightly used line to a backwater rail station in Bad Nieuweschans on the German-Dutch border, which they crossed without incident. She was now in the Netherlands. With care, Meitner could now travel. She first flew to Copenhagen. There she was greeted by Frisch, and stayed with the Niels Bohrs at their holiday house in Tisvilde.

In early August she took the train to Stockholm, where she was met by friends. They took a train, and then a steamer to Kungälv, where she stayed until September. Hahn told everyone at KWI that Meitner had gone to Vienna to visit her relatives, and a few days later the institute closed for the summer. Later Meitner wrote to Berlin requesting retirement. She also asked to have her belongings shipped to Sweden, but the Reich Ministry of Education blocked that effort. Her only worldly possessions were the few things she had brought with her from Berlin.

The Exile Years
Lise Meitner would never return to Germany or Austria. She lived the rest of her life in Sweden and in England, where she died. But her physics work did not stop in exile. It was greatly impeded, but she corresponded with Hahn about their research.

It turned out that Sweden was not very welcoming to Meitner. Money was short, her equipment was inferior to what she had in Germany. On top of it all she was worried about her family in Austria. Meitner was isolated and depressed, but she did the best she could with what she had.

Things improved after the war. In 1946 she also went to the United States for six months, where she lectured at Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia University. In the US she was also in contact with various physicists and academics, including Einstein.

In 1947 she was able to move to the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, where a new facility for atomic research had been established. But in the end she never won a Noble Prize for Physics, something recognized today as a grave, unjust failure.

Otto Hahn’s Nobel Snub
The man who did win a Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission (in 1945 for 1944) was Otto Hahn. In his acceptance speech in Oslo, Hahn barely mentioned Meitner’s name, and referred to her as an assistant or co-worker, ignoring the fact that he and Fritz Strassmann had failed to realize what they had achieved in a Berlin lab until Lise Meitner, then exiled in Sweden, explained it to them. Hahn the chemist needed Meitner the physicist to help him grasp the fact that he and Strassmann had in fact unknowingly split the atom in 1939.

In 1938 Hahn and Strassmann had published a paper on their atomic experiments with uranium and protactinium, without including Meitner’s name. This despite her pioneering research with that element, and the fact that she and Hahn had worked together for 30 years in Berlin, and had continued to correspond about their work even after she had to flee Nazi Germany. Hahn might be forgiven for not crediting the Jewish Meitner during the Nazi years, but he also failed to do so when it was no longer dangerous. Even after the war, he helped perpetuate the myth of Hahn as the lone discoverer of nuclear fission.

Meitner and Frisch published their own theoretical interpretation of Hahn and Strassmann’s results in the February 1939 edition of the journal Nature. Unlike Hahn, they also devised experiments to test their hypothesis. In the following weeks, they published two more papers with the results, which became the first physical confirmation of what Frisch coined “nuclear fission.” Meitner and Frisch were also nominated for the physics prize in 1944, but only Hahn won.

*According to the Nobel Prize archive, Meitner was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 30 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1967. The Nobel insult to Meitner has never been corrected, and the Hahn-as-dicoverer myth lives on.

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