Charles Proteus Steinmetz (born Karl August Rudolph Steinmetz; April 9, 1865–October 26, 1923) was a mathematician and electrical engineer from Prussia who later became an American. He taught at Union College and helped develop alternating current, which allowed the electric power industry in the United States to grow. He created mathematical theories that helped engineers solve problems.
Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim (February 5, 1840 – November 24, 1916) was an American-born British inventor most famous for creating the first automatic machine gun, the Maxim gun. He held patents for many mechanical devices, including hair-curling irons, a mousetrap, and steam pumps. Maxim said he invented the lightbulb.
George Westinghouse Jr. (October 6, 1846 – March 12, 1914) was a very productive American inventor, engineer, and business leader from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is best known for creating the railway air brake and for helping develop the use of alternating current (AC) electrical power.
Friedrich Wilhelm Strassmann (German: [fʁɪt͡s ˈʃtʁasˌman]; 22 February 1902 – 22 April 1980) was a German chemist. In December 1938, he and Otto Hahn discovered that barium was produced when uranium was bombarded with neutrons. This finding was important evidence that showed a new process called nuclear fission, which was later explained and published by Lise Meitner and Robert Frisch.
Otto Hahn (German: [ˈɔtoː ˈhaːn]; 8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who helped develop the field of radiochemistry. He is known as the father of nuclear chemistry and the discoverer of nuclear fission, the process that powers nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Hahn and Lise Meitner studied radioactive elements such as radium, thorium, protactinium, and uranium.
Sir James Chadwick was born on October 20, 1891, and died on July 24, 1974. He was a British scientist who studied how matter works through experiments. In 1935, he was given the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the neutron, a particle found in the center of atoms.
Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist and chemical engineer. He is commonly known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb” and was one of the creators of the Teller–Ulam design, which was inspired by Stanisław Ulam. Teller was born in Austria-Hungary in 1908.
J. Robert Oppenheimer (born Julius Robert Oppenheimer; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American scientist who studied how the universe works. He led the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons.
Enrico Fermi (Italian: [enˈriːko ˈfermi]; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian-American physicist known for creating the first artificial nuclear reactor, called the Chicago Pile-1, and for working on the Manhattan Project. He received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing how new radioactive elements can be made using neutrons and for discovering nuclear reactions caused by slow neutrons. He is often called the “architect of the nuclear age” and the “architect of the atomic bomb.” Fermi was one of the few scientists who excelled in both theoretical and experimental physics.
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937), was a scientist from New Zealand who studied physics and chemistry. He made important discoveries in the fields of atomic and nuclear physics. He was called “the father of nuclear physics” and “the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday.” In 1908, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the breakdown of elements and the study of radioactive materials.