Otto Hahn

Otto Hahn was born in Frankfurt am Main on 8 March 1879, the youngest son of Heinrich Hahn, a prosperous glazier and founder of the Glasbau Hahn company, and Charlotte Hahn (née Giese). He had an older half-brother Karl, his mother's son from her previous marriage, and two older brothers, Heiner and Julius. The family lived above his father's workshop. The younger three boys were educated at the Klinger Oberrealschule in Frankfurt. At the age of 15, Otto began to take a special interest in chemistry, and carried out simple experiments in the laundry room of the family home. His father wanted him to study architecture, as he had built or acquired several residential and business properties, but Otto persuaded him that his ambition was to become an industrial chemist.

In 1897, after passing his Abitur, Hahn began to study chemistry at Marburg University. His subsidiary subjects were mathematics, physics, mineralogy and philosophy. Hahn joined the Students' Association of Natural Sciences and Medicine, a student fraternity and a forerunner of today's Landsmannschaft Nibelungi (Coburger Convent der akademischen Landsmannschaften und Turnerschaften). He spent his third and fourth semesters at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, studying organic chemistry under Adolf von Baeyer, physical chemistry under Wilhelm Muthmann, and inorganic chemistry under Karl Andreas Hofmann. In 1901, Hahn received his doctorate at Marburg University for a dissertation entitled "On Bromine Derivates of Isoeugenol", a topic in classical organic chemistry. He completed his one-year military service (instead of the usual two because he had a doctorate) in the 81st Infantry Regiment, but unlike his brothers, did not apply for a commission. He then returned to Marburg University, where he worked for two years as assistant to his doctoral supervisor, Geheimrat professor Theodor Zincke.

Discovery of radiothorium and other "new elements"

Hahn's intention was still to work in industry. He received an offer of employment from Eugen Fischer, the director of Kalle & Co. (and the father of organic chemist Hans Fischer), but a condition of employment was that Hahn had to have lived in another country and have a reasonable command of another language. With this in mind, and to improve his knowledge of English, Hahn took up a post at University College London in 1904, working under Sir William Ramsay, who was known for having discovered the noble gases. Here Hahn worked on radiochemistry, at that time a very new field. In early 1905, in the course of his work with salts of radium, Hahn discovered a new substance he called radiothorium (thorium-228), which at that time was believed to be a new radioactive element. In fact, it was an isotope of the known element thorium; the concept of an isotope, along with the term, was coined in 1913 by the British chemist Frederick Soddy.

Ramsay was enthusiastic when yet another new element was found in his institute, and he intended to announce the discovery in a correspondingly suitable way. In accordance with tradition this was done before the committee of the venerable Royal Society. At the session of the Royal Society on 16 March 1905 Ramsay communicated Hahn's discovery of radiothorium. The Daily Telegraph informed its readers:

Very soon the scientific papers will be agog with a new discovery which has been added to the many brilliant triumphs of Gower Street. Dr. Otto Hahn, who is working at University College, has discovered a new radioactive element, extracted from a mineral from Ceylon, named Thorianite, and possibly, it is conjectured, the substance which renders thorium radioactive. Its activity is at least 250,000 times as great as that of thorium, weight for weight. It gives off a gas (generally called an emanation), identical with the radioactive emanation from thorium. Another theory of deep interest is that it is the possible source of a radioactive element possibly stronger in radioactivity than radium itself, and capable of producing all the curious effects which are known of radium up to the present. – The discoverer read a paper on the subject to the Royal Society last week, and this should rank, when published, among the most original of recent contributions to scientific literature.

Hahn published his results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on 24 May 1905. It was the first of more than 250 scientific publications in the field of radiochemistry. At the end of his time in London, Ramsay asked Hahn about his plans for the future, and Hahn told him about the job offer from Kalle & Co. Ramsay told him radiochemistry had a bright future, and that someone who had discovered a new radioactive element should go to the University of Berlin. Ramsay wrote to Emil Fischer, the head of the chemistry institute there, who replied that Hahn could work in his laboratory, but could not be a Privatdozent because radiochemistry was not taught there. At this point, Hahn decided that he first needed to know more about the subject, so he wrote to the leading expert on the field, Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford agreed to take Hahn on as an assistant, and Hahn's parents undertook to pay Hahn's expenses.

From September 1905 until mid-1906, Hahn worked with Rutherford's group in the basement of the Macdonald Physics Building at McGill University in Montreal. There was some scepticism about the existence of radiothorium, which Bertram Boltwood memorably described as a compound of thorium X and stupidity. Boltwood was soon convinced that it did exist, although he and Hahn differed on what its half-life was. William Henry Bragg and Richard Kleeman had noted that the alpha particles emitted from radioactive substances always had the same energy, providing a second way of identifying them, so Hahn set about measuring the alpha particle emissions of radiothorium. In the process, he found that a precipitation of thorium A (polonium-216) and thorium B (lead-212) also contained a short-lived "element", which he named thorium C (which was later identified as polonium-212). Hahn was unable to separate it, and concluded that it had a very short half-life (it is about 300 ns). He also identified radioactinium (thorium-227) and radium D (later identified as lead-210). Rutherford remarked that: "Hahn has a special nose for discovering new elements."

In June 1911, while attending a conference in Stettin, Hahn met Edith Junghans (1887–1968), a student at the Royal School of Art in Berlin. They saw each other again in Berlin, and became engaged in November 1912. On 22 March 1913 the couple were married in Stettin, where Edith's father, Paul Ferdinand Junghans, was a high-ranking law officer and President of the City Parliament until his death in 1915. After a honeymoon at Punta San Vigilio on Lake Garda in Italy, they visited Vienna, and then Budapest, where they stayed with George de Hevesy.

They had one child, Hanno Hahn, who was born on 9 April 1922. Hanno enlisted in the army in 1942, and served on the Eastern Front in World War II as a panzer commander. He lost an arm in combat. After the war he became an art historian and architectural researcher (at the Hertziana in Rome), known for his discoveries in the early Cistercian architecture of the 12th century. In August 1960, while on a study trip in France, Hanno died in a car accident, together with his wife and assistant Ilse Hahn née Pletz. They left a fourteen-year-old son, Dietrich Hahn.

In 1990, the Hanno and Ilse Hahn Prize for outstanding contributions to Italian art history was established in memory of Hanno and Ilse Hahn to support young and talented art historians. It is awarded biennially by the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome.