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Leo Szilard Research Paper

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Leo Szilard was born on February 11, 1898 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary. His father was a civil engineer, and Szilard decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. In 1916, he went to college at a technical university in Budapest for a year before he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army. In 1917, Szilard was saved from going to the front lines by an unknown illness. After the war in 1920, he went to school at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, Germany. He studied physics with famous physicists Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max Von Laue. After studying with Einstein, they became close friends. He went far with his academics in Germany, but eventually moved from Germany to London due to the rise of the Nazi Party in 1933 and then …show more content…

Szilard was one of several scientists to convince Einstein to write to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about building an atomic bomb. Some historians believe Szilard was the first scientist to think seriously about building an atomic bomb. He was worried about what might happen if the Germans developed the bomb first. He researched chain reactions alongside Enrico Fermi. They were awarded with a patent for their research on December 2, 1942. He researched nuclear reactions at the University of Chicago from 1942 to 1945. He helped start The Manhattan Project, which was a war effort to transform atomic energy for military purposes. He was shocked after seeing the destructive force of the atomic bomb and decided to join the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which was an organization that wanted to prevent further military use of atomic energy. Szilard is considered a famous engineer because his discoveries changed the course of history for the world forever. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was ultimately the turning point for WWII. Szilard was a smart man who had a passion for what was right; he knew what Hitler was doing was not right, so he fought against him using the strongest weapon for all of mankind- one’s

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