Death of a Navigator

Historians differ about which battles were really decisive and about which great men of history were really great. Few will differ about Italian-born Physicist Enrico Fermi, a great man of science who achieved the first nuclear chain reaction and thereby initiated the Atomic Age. This week in Chicago, Enrico Fermi, 53, died of cancer. If he had lived a few years longer, medical techniques growing out of his own discoveries might have rid him of his fatal disease.

Squash-Court Drama. The high point of Fermi's career is one of those rare events that will be described again and again as long as men are interested in the history of their species. It happened on Dec. 2, 1942, in a squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago's football stadium. An international group of physicists watched with some apprehension a massive, dead-black structure of graphite bricks with uranium spotted through it. Fermi was in charge. His discoveries in Italy about neutron behavior (which won him the Nobel Prize in 1938) had laid the "pile's" scientific foundations. His development work in the U.S. had built it out of theory. Now the pile was ready to go. The watchers knew that on its performance hung the success of the plutonium bomb and perhaps the outcome of World War II.

Calmly and cautiously, Fermi gave the necessary orders. Inch by inch, a neutron-absorbing control rod was drawn out of the reactor. The instruments watching its behavior began to click louder. Fermi would not be rushed. At 11:35 a.m. he casually remarked, "Let's go to lunch," and the reactor was shut down.

Back from a long, unhurried lunch, Fermi reassembled his crew. The control rods were drawn out. The instruments clamored louder; the curve of the reaction climbed toward the critical level. At 3:25 p.m. the pile "went critical," i.e., a self-sustained chain reaction started. Its mass was still silent and motionless, but the physicists knew that a new kind of fire was burning inside it.

Later Physicist Arthur Compton telephoned President James Conant of Harvard, who was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, and gave lim a prearranged code message. Said Compton: "The Italian navigator has reached the New World."

Faint Beginnings. Fermi fled from Mussolini's tyranny and reached the U.S. n time to become a key man in the atom-bomb project. Many honors came to Fermi, but they did not make him less be-oved by his colleagues and students. His ife after the squash-court event was omething of an anticlimax (it could not lave been otherwise), but it was happy and productive. He had a zest for life (skiing, swimming, mountain climbing) as ell as for knowledge.

Like most physicists, Fermi regretted that atomic energy, so far, has been used largely for military purposes. He died just as the world was on the verge of seeing the faint beginnings of the peacetime good that it can bring.

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