Otto Robert Frisch was an Austrian-born British physicist who worked on nuclear physics. With Otto Stern and Immanuel Estermann he first measured the magnetic moment of the proton. With Lise Meitner he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission and first experimentally detected the fission by-products. Later, with his collaborator Rudolf Peierls he designed the first theoretical mechanism for the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1940.
Otto Robert Frisch's wartime Los Alamos ID badge photo
Otto Frisch, Lise Meitner, and Glenn Seaborg
The Godiva device at Los Alamos
Left to right: William Penney, Otto Frisch, Rudolf Peierls and John Cockcroft in 1946
Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie".
Meitner in 1946
Meitner in 1906
Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in 1912
Meitner and Hahn in their laboratory, in 1913. When a colleague she did not recognise said that they had met before, Meitner replied: "You probably mistake me for Professor Hahn."