Brief Description Of Edward Teller

527 Words2 Pages

Edward Teller

Edward Teller is a Hungarian-American physicist, known for his work on the hydrogen bomb. Teller was born in Budapest in 1908, and was educated in Germany at the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe and at the universities of Munich and Leipzig. He received his Ph.D. in physics in 1930. After working at the University of Goettingen with James Frank and at the Niels Bohr Institute, he became Professor of Physics at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. in 1935. In 1941 he became an American citizen. In the same year he joined the U.S. atomic bomb development project known as the Manhattan Project. For more than a decade he worked with the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi on this and succeeding projects at Columbia University, at the University of Chicago, and at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Edward Teller managed Los Alamos research on the "Super," as he called the hydrogen bomb. Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and the end of World War II slowed "Super" research. Teller, a strong anti-Communist and sensitive to U.S. and Soviet relations, pushed unsuccessfully to accelerate work on a super-bomb. He was frustrated by the post-war direction of Los Alamos. He accepted a University of Chicago professorship and left Los Alamos in October 1945. In April 1946, Teller returned to Los Alamos and led a secret conference on the "Super." The conference reviewed his earlier work on fusion, which led to his full-time re...

Open Document