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Person

Leo Szilard

A man wearing glasses and a dark suit with a striped tie sits in front of a traffic light, suggesting a moment of contemplation or inspiration.

Hungarian-American physicist, 1898–1964. While waiting at a traffic light on Southampton Row in London in September 1933, he conceived the idea of a neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction and patented it the following year. In 1939 he drafted the letter Einstein signed to President Roosevelt warning that an atomic bomb might be possible. He spent the rest of his life campaigning against the weapon he had helped imagine.

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