Szilard had written in his letter that England was “a
Before then Szilard had located a possible patron there, a Jewish financier of Virginia background named Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, his first and middle names honoring his East Prussian maternal grandfather, his last name softened in Southern fashion to
Strauss had dreamed as a boy of becoming a physicist. The recession of 1913-14 had staggered his family's Richmond business — wholesale shoes — and his father had called on him at seventeen to drum a four-state territory. He did well; by 1917 he had saved twenty thousand dollars and was once again preparing to pursue a physics career. This time the Great War intervened. A childhood accident had left Strauss with marginal vision in one eye. His mother doted on him. She allowed his younger brother to volunteer for military service but looked for some less dangerous contribution for her favorite son. It turned up when Woodrow Wilson appointed the celebrated mining engineer and Belgian relief administrator Herbert Hoover as Food Administrator to manage U.S. supplies during the war. The wealthy Hoover was serving in Washington without pay and assembling a prosperous, unpaid young staff, Rhodes scholars preferred. Rosa Lichtenstein Strauss sent her boy.
He was twenty-one, knew how to ingratiate himself, knew also how to work. Improbable as it appears against a field of Rhodes scholars, within a month Hoover appointed the high-school-graduate wholesale shoe drummer as his private secretary. After the Armistice young Strauss shifted with Hoover to Paris, hastily picked up French at tutoring sessions over lunch and helped organize the allocation of 27 million tons of food and supplies to twenty-three countries. On the side he assisted the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in its work of relieving the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees streaming from Eastern Europe in the wake of war.
Strauss believed God had planned his life, which contributed greatly to his self-confidence. God let him take up employment when he was twenty-three, in 1919, at Kuhn, Loeb, a distinguished house with a number of major railroads among its clients. Four years later he married Alice Hanauer, daughter of one of the partners. His salary and participation reached $75,000 a year in 1926; the following year it escalated to $120,000. In 1929 he became a partner himself and settled into prosperous gentility.
The 1930s brought him pain and grief. After resisting Chaim Weiz-mann's attempts to convert him to Zionism at a Jewish conference in London in 1933 — “My boy, you are difficult,” Weizmann told him; “we will have to grind you down” — he returned to the United States to discover his mother terminally ill with cancer. She died early in 1935; the disease took his father as well in the hot summer of 1937. Strauss looked for a suitable memorial. “I became aware,” he reports in his memoirs, “of the inadequate supply of radium for the treatment of cancer in American hospitals.” He established the Lewis and Rosa Strauss Memorial Fund and turned up a young refugee physicist from Berlin, Arno Brasch. Brasch had designed a capacitor-driven discharge tube for producing bursts of high-energy X rays, a “surge generator.” When Leo Szilard was working at St. Bart's with Chalmers in the summer of 1934 he had arranged for Brasch and his colleagues in Berlin to break up beryllium with hard X rays; the experiment had been a success and Brasch and four other contributors had signed the report to
Enter Leo Szilard, still in England:
August 30, 1937
Dear Mr. Strauss:
I understand that you are interested in the development of a surge generator with the view of using it for producing artificially radioactive elements…
At present… I am not in the position of [offering manufacturing rights under this patent]. It is possible, however, that at a later date… I shall obtain full liberty of action concerning this patent. If this happens I shall let you have a non-exclusive license, royalty free,
Yours very truly,
Leo Szilard
Brasch and Szilard owned the patent in question jointly. Szilard's letter offers to give his interest away free of charge nonexclusively to Strauss, a politic salutation to a rich man. But not even Leo Szilard could live on air, and as Strauss makes clear in his memoirs, the two young physicists eventually “asked me to finance them in the construction of a ‘surge generator.’” On the other hand, Szilard as usual seems to have sought no personal financial gain from the project beyond, perhaps, basic support. In the time he could spare from observing the developing disaster in Europe he was apparently trying to promote the building of equipment with which he might explore further the possibility of a chain reaction.
He crossed the Atlantic in late September to reconnoiter. A friend remembers discussing the feasibility of an atomic bomb with Szilard during this period. “In the same conversation he spoke of his ideas for preserving peaches in tins in such a way that they would retain the texture and taste of the fresh fruit.” When the surge-generator negotiations bogged down in debates among the lawyers, the resourceful Szilard distracted Strauss with the idea of using radiation to preserve and protect the natural products of farm and field. The tobacco worm might be exterminated, for example. But would irradiation harm the tobacco? Among Szilard's surviving papers is lodged a fading letter from Dr. M. Lenz of the Montefiore Hospital for Chronic Diseases that reports the decisive experiment:
On April 14, 1938, at 2:30 p.m., your six cigars were irradiated with 100 kv., a filter focus distance of 20 cm. with ten minutes in front and ten minutes over the back of each cigar. This gave them 1000 r. in front and 1500 r. in back of each cigar.
I hope that your friend finds the taste unchanged.
Szilard also bought pork from a meat market on Amsterdam Avenue, saving the receipt, and arranged its irradiation to see if X rays might kill the parasitic worm of trichinosis. He even dispatched his brother Bela to Chicago to discuss the matter with Swift & Company, which reported it had in fact made similar experiments of its own.
The surge-generator project developed through the year, incidentally giving Strauss the opportunity to meet Ernest Lawrence, who dropped by to pitch the new sixty-inch cyclotron he was building — the pole pieces were sixty inches across, but the magnet would weigh nearly two hundred tons. Lawrence and his brother John, a physician, had arrested their mother's cancer with accelerator radiation and intended to use the big cyclotron to further that research. Strauss remained loyal to the surge generator.
Segre encountered Strauss's Hungarian wizard in New York that summer. The elegant Italian was professor of physics at Palermo by then, married to a German woman who had fled Breslau to escape the Nazis, with a young son:
I left Palermo with a return ticket, and I arrived in New York. I met Szilard. “Oh, what are you doing here?” He was a good friend of mine. I knew him quite well. “What are you doing here? What's going on?”
I said, “I'm going to Berkeley to look at the short-lived isotopes of element 43,” which was my plan. “I'll
