Storiascopio · Era 11 of 12 · lower secondary year 3
Fermi and the first atomic pile
1942 · University of Chicago, United States
In short
Enrico Fermi, a physicist from Rome who won the Nobel Prize in 1938, left Italy that year partly because the racial laws targeted his wife Laura, who was Jewish. In the United States, under the stands of a sports stadium at the University of Chicago, he and his team built a huge pile of graphite and uranium blocks. On 2 December 1942 he achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction: the energy held in the nuclei of atoms was released a little at a time, without exploding.
Why it matters It opened the way both to nuclear power stations and, sadly, to atomic weapons.
Source: Treccani, entry “Fermi, Enrico”
Where we are in the era “Early 20th century”
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1903Event 19 of 25about 1950
Your turn
Name ______________________ Class ______ Date __________
When did it happen? Find the date at the top and write it here:
Tell it in your own words: what happened?
Draw the scene below.
storiascopio.com/en/event/fermi-and-the-first-atomic-pile/ · free worksheet, you may photocopy it for your class