Photo credit: Basch, [...] / Opdracht Anefo — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0 nl
Otto Hahn
1879–1968 · Germany · Born in the 1800s
Nobel Chemistry 1944
Discovered nuclear fission with Fritz Strassmann in 1938; Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch gave its physical explanation.
Nobel Prize work
The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honored his discovery of nuclear fission. Bombarding uranium with neutrons in late 1938, Hahn and Fritz Strassmann chemically identified barium among the products — proof that the uranium nucleus had split in two, , the chemical basis of the process Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch then explained physically.