Egon Bretscher
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Egon Bretscher | |
|---|---|
 Bretscher's Los Alamos identity badge photo | |
| Born | 23 May 1901 Zurich, Switzerland |
| Died | 16 April 1973 (aged 71) Zurich, Switzerland |
| Alma mater | |
| Spouse |
Hanna Greminger (m. 1931) |
| Children | 5, including Mark and Anthony |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | |
Egon Bretscher CBE (23 May 1901 – 16 April 1973)[2] was a Swiss-born British chemist and nuclear physicist[3] and Head of the Nuclear Physics Division from 1948 to 1966[4] at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, also known as Harwell Laboratory, in Harwell, United Kingdom. He was one of the pioneers in nuclear fission research and one of the first to foresee that plutonium could be used as an energy source.[5] His work on nuclear physics led to his involvement in the British atomic bomb research project Tube Alloys and his membership of the British Mission to the Manhattan Project[6] at Los Alamos, where he worked in Enrico Fermi's Advanced Development Division in the F-3 Super Experimentation group.[7] His contributions up to 1945 are discussed by Margaret Gowing in her "Britain and Atomic Energy, 1935-1945."
Born in Zurich, Switzerland and educated at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) there, Bretscher gained a PhD degree in organic chemistry at Edinburgh in 1926.[6] He returned to Zurich as privat docent to Peter Debye, later moving in 1936 to work in Rutherford’s laboratory at the Cavendish in Cambridge as a Rockefeller Scholar. Here he switched to research in nuclear physics, proposing (with Norman Feather) in 1940 that the 239 isotope of element 94 could be produced from the common isotope of uranium-238 by neutron capture and that, like U-235, this should be able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. A similar conclusion was independently arrived at by Edwin McMillan and Philip Abelson at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. In addition, he devised theoretical chemical procedures for purifying this unknown element away from the parent uranium; this element was named plutonium by Nicholas Kemmer.
Bretscher used to joke that his main contribution to physics occurred in the summer of 1930, when he was climbing in the Bergell region near Engadin with another student, Felix Bloch, in the Swiss Alps.[8] Bloch slipped over an icy edge but was saved, as he fell, by the rope joining him to Bretscher. The latter's swift action in driving his ice axe into the ice prevented their combined demise. After raising the alarm, Bretscher returned with a guide and spent the night with Bloch discussing physics. It took guides a further three days to bring Bloch down. Bloch later won the Nobel Prize for physics for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance.
