Lise Meitner
Inspirational chemist
A Timeline of Lise Meitner's Life
- 1878 - Born as the third of eight children into a Jewish Family in Vienna
- 1905 - Became the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna
- 1912 - Volunteered in the Hahn's department of Radiochemistry at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute (KWI) in Berlin-Dahlem, south west in Berlin.
- 1913 - Secured a permanent position at KWI
- 1915 - became the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna
- 1905 - Served as a nurse in WW1 handing X-ray equipment
- 1917 - Along with Hahn, she discovered the first long-lived isotope of the element protactinium, for which she was awarded the Leibniz Medal by the Berlin Academy of Sciences.
- 1922 - Discovered the cause of the emission from surfaces of electrons with 'signature' energies, known as the Auger effect.
- 1926 - Meitner became the first woman in Germany to assume a post of full professor in physics, at the University of Berlin.
- 1938 - Escaped Berlin to the Netherlands.
- 1938 - Her research lead to the discovery of nuclear fission and related the energy release to Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2
- 1942 - Meitner's research into nuclear fission lead to the start of the Manhattan Project. Meitner refused to work on the project.
- 1946 - Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Otto Hann for his work on nuclear fission.
- 1949 - Meitner became a Swedish citizen.
- 1960 - Retired to the UK.
- 1964 - Suffered a heart attack on a trip the US.
- 1968 - Meitner died in a Cambridge nursing home aged 89.
"Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity"