Otto Robert Frisch

Physicist, born in Vienna, Austria. He studied at Vienna, and in 1945 became head of the nuclear physics division at Harwell. He and Meitner (his aunt) first described ‘nuclear fission’ in 1939 to explain Hahn's results with uranium and neutrons. He moved to Birmingham in 1939, and worked with Peierls on uranium fission and associated neutron emission, then became involved in the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, USA. In 1947 he became professor of natural philosophy at Cambridge, UK, and directed the nuclear physics department of the Cavendish Laboratory.

Otto Robert Frisch (1 October 1904–22 September 1979), Austrian-British physicist.

Frisch was Jewish, born in Vienna in 1904 the son of a painter and a concert pianist. He himself was talented at both but also had inherited his aunt Lise Meitner's love of physics and commenced a period of study at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1926 with some work on the effect of the newly discovered electron on salts. After some years working in relatively obscure laboratories in Germany, Frisch obtained a position in Hamburg under the Nobel Prize winning scientist Otto Stern.

The accession of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany in 1933 made Frisch make the decision to move to London where he joined the staff at Birkbeck College and worked with the physicist Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett on cloud chamber technology and artificial radioactivity.

During the Christmas holiday in 1938 he visited his aunt Lise Meitner in Kungälv. Frisch and Meitner hypothesized that the uranium nucleus had split in two, explained the process (in terms of excessive electrical charge), estimated the energy released, coined the term fission to describe it, and theorized the potential for a chain reaction. Meitner's and Frisch's paper explained the physics behind the phenomenon.

In the Summer of 1939 Frisch left Denmark for what he anticipated would be a short trip to Birmingham. With war on his mind and working with the physicist Rudolf Peierls the two produced the Frisch-Peierls memorandum which was the first document to set out a process by which an atomic explosion could be generated;

This memorandum was the basis of British work on building an atomic device (the Tube Alloys project) and also that of the Manhattan Project on which Frisch worked as part of the British delegation. In 1946 he returned to England to take up the post of head of the nuclear physics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, though he also spent much of the next thirty years teaching at Cambridge where he was Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy and a fellow of Trinity College. He currently has surviving relatives in the United States of America including Adam Frisch, a former lobbyist in the state of Georgia.