I’ve been researching Szilard’s life for decades, for a book on his role in the birth of the nuclear age. Why has my research taken so long? Well, consider that Szilard was one of the most versatile and mobile geniuses of the twentieth century. Let me give you a brief description of my research.
The Leo Szilard Papers are housed at UCSD in La Jolla, California. It’s a wonderful place to research, by the way; the library is only a short walk from the ocean. The UCSD collection contains more than 45 linear feet of Szilard’s letters, patents, documents, and even his slide rules.
The Szilard Papers are voluminous, but only a starting point. Much of the record of Szilard’s life must be found elsewhere, scattered in archives and personal homes throughout the world. Szilard lived in four countries, and most of my time has been spent tracking down letters, documents, and memories from his wide-ranging life.
My research has taken me across much of the landscape of the nuclear age and twentieth-century science. I’ve interviewed scientists ranging from Linus Pauling to Edward Teller. I’ve visited the Trinity site and read the Manhattan Project files in the National Archives. Szilard’s younger brother Bela told me about their early days in Budapest and Berlin. Aaron Novick, Szilard’s long-time collaborator in molecular biology, told me many stories over the years about their work at the University of Chicago. There have been so many people, and so many archives. Each holds part of Szilard’s story.
It’s been an amazing journey, and I wish I could tell you all that I’ve discovered.
It’s not too late to contact me if you have information. Do you have letters or photos? Have you seen Szilard references in an obscure archive? Is there a dusty suitcase in your attic? The bulk of Szilard’s correspondence from his Berlin years — known to include letters from Einstein — has never been found...
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4