I’m listening again to Richard Rhodes’ “the Making of the Atomic Bomb”. In 1939 and continuing, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard did experiments together in which they were looking for secondary neutrons from the fission of Uranium. In what language did these two speak and write to each other?
I know they both eventually spoke English. Szilard had been living in England since the mid 1930’s, but Fermi was just emigrating to the US in 1939, though he had visited the US previously. Another guess might be German, as Fermi no doubt learned to read this so that he could understand German journals.
Can someone with biographies of these two determine: When did Fermi learn English? Szilard? When did Szilard learn German, at Gymnasium or sooner?
According to Laura Fermi’s Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi (Chicago, 1954, p76-7), her husband started seriously learning English for his visit to Ann Arbor in the summer of 1930, beginning with Jack London novels. By the end of his stay he was able to lecture in English with only occasional mistakes (p78).
I’d presume they used English.
I should add that Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts (ed. by Weart and Szilard, MIT, 1978) contains exactly one letter from Szilard to Fermi. Document 86, dating from July 1940, shows no evidence of having been translated into the English it’s printed in.
Lanouette surely does discuss the matter of Szilard’s education, but I don’t have a copy to hand.
Szilard could however speak German, regardless of what he’d been taught at school: he’d done his Ph.D. under von Laue in Berlin in the early 1920s and continued to work in the city until 1933. As you’ve already realised, he’d then emigrated to Britain. At more or less this stage, he could already read English: his epiphany on Southampton Row, with which Rhodes opens The Making of the Atomic Bomb, had been prompted by an article in that morning’s Times.
[It’s rather incidental to the question, but I suspect the famous meeting with Einstein on Long Island was conducted in German. The initial idea was to write a letter to the Belgian government and that was drafted in German, with Wigner translating it into English later.]
As for Fermi’s German, he first went to Germany in 1923. Amongst his wife’s comments on the trip (p31) is:
They thus could have conversed in German, but they were also both fluent in English and I see no reason to suppose they didn’t use that. Particularly since that’s what everybody else round about would understand.
They surely spoke English. Both knew English before they met. German, French, and English were required for staying current in physics (particularly German), but I can’t imagine that either of them preferred German or French to English.
My reading of Rhodes’ book suggests that they weren’t really colleagues. Fermi was a dedicated, pragmatic, single-minded experimentalist; Szilard was a wide-ranging, visionary theoretician. Szilard often seemed to be at loose ends; he ended up with Fermi (at Columbia at first and then at Chicago) because Fermi seemed to be most interested in neutrons. Szilard was of course most interested in neutrons because of chain reactions.
Szilard was much closer to Teller (since both were Hungarians) and others than to Fermi.