The Carpenter's Room
Lise Meitner was born in Vienna in 1878 into an assimilated Jewish family of eight children, at a time when Austrian girls were barred from the academic secondary schools that led to university. She qualified as a French teacher, then took private tuition to compress eight years of gymnasium study into two, passed the entrance examination, and completed a doctorate in physics in 1906 as one of the first women to do so at Vienna. There was no obvious career at the end of it.
In 1907 she moved to Berlin for Max Planck's lectures and met the chemist Otto Hahn, beginning a partnership that lasted three decades. The institute director, Emil Fischer, did not admit women to his laboratories, so the two worked in a converted carpentry workshop in the basement with its own outside entrance, and Meitner was forbidden the upper floors. She was unpaid for years, and Planck later made her his assistant, the first woman he had appointed to such a post.
Escape
By the 1920s she directed her own physics section, held a professorship, and with Hahn had found the isotope protactinium. The Nazi laws of 1933 stripped her of teaching rights, but her Austrian citizenship shielded her from dismissal until the annexation of Austria in March 1938 removed that protection overnight. Colleagues abroad organised an escape. The Dutch physicist Dirk Coster travelled to Berlin, and with the help of Paul Rosbaud she crossed the frontier in July 1938 on invalid papers, carrying two small suitcases.
Hahn gave her a diamond ring inherited from his mother, to be used as a bribe if the crossing failed. She reached the Netherlands and then Stockholm, where Manne Siegbahn's institute offered her a bench, little money and no real place. Sweden's leading experimentalist regarded her as an awkward guest rather than a colleague. At sixty she had lost her laboratory, her country and her standing, and she continued the uranium work by post with the men still in Berlin.
A Walk in the Snow, and the Prize
In December 1938 Hahn and Fritz Strassmann bombarded uranium with neutrons and found barium, an element roughly half its size, which made no chemical sense. Hahn wrote to Meitner asking for an explanation. She was at Kungalv with her nephew Otto Frisch, and on a walk in the snow the two treated the nucleus as a liquid drop that could elongate and divide, calculating from Einstein's mass-energy relation that each split would release roughly two hundred million electron volts. Frisch borrowed a term from biology and called it fission.
Their interpretation appeared in Nature early in 1939 and the world changed within six years. Meitner refused an invitation to join the Manhattan Project. The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Hahn alone, and archives opened in the 1990s showed a committee that had misjudged the physics, discounted an exile, and never revisited the decision. Meitner received the Enrico Fermi Award in 1966 and died in 1968; element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour in 1997. She had spent three decades building the work that the citation left out.
