Three months after the Munich Agreement, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin discovered the fission of uranium.
The road to the atomic bomb began there.
The events
- Munich Agreement1938 · Munich. In September 1938 Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to give Germany Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland without the Czechoslovaks at the table. Six months later Hitler occupied the whole country, and appeasement had failed.
- Discovery of nuclear fission1938 · Berlin. In December 1938 Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann found that uranium nuclei split when bombarded with neutrons; Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch explained the process. The discovery led to both nuclear power and the atomic bomb.
More amazing facts
- 1922 In November 1922 Howard Carter peered into Tutankhamun's tomb; just over a month later the USSR was founded.
- 1927 · 1952 The last wild European bison was killed in the Caucasus in 1927.
- 1936 The thylacine was granted protection on 10 July 1936; the last known animal died at Hobart Zoo on 7 September — just 59 days later.
- 1953 Spring 1953: the structure of DNA was published on 25 April, and on 29 May Hillary and Tenzing reached the top of Everest.
- 1956 In autumn 1956 the world watched two crises at once: the Anglo-French landing at the Suez Canal and Soviet tanks in Budapest.
- 1957 1957: the USSR launched the first satellite, and six countries signed the Treaty of Rome, the seed of the future EU.