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Born into the family of a Frankfurt glazier, Otto Hahn studied chemistry at the University of Marburg, earning his doctorate in 1901. He served briefly in the military, then taught at Marburg before moving to London in 1904. Here he worked at University College with the British scientist Sir William Ramsay. The two men studied phenomena associated with radioactivity, and, in the course of this work, Hahn discovered the existence of a new radioactive substance, radiothorium, a breakthrough that, with Ramsay's help, earned Hahn a post on the faculty of the University of Berlin. Before beginning his duties there, Hahn worked briefly with the British physicist Ernest Rutherford in Montreal, then, once in Germany again, collaborated with the brilliant Austrian physicist Lise Meitner. In 1911, Hahn and Meitner took their work to the newly opened Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry at Berlin-Dahlen, where Hahn headed the department of radiochemistry. This would become the nexus of German research on radioactivity and, ultimately, on nuclear fission, the basis (among many other things) of atomic weaponry.

During World War I, Hahn was attached to a military regiment and served his country as a specialist in chemical warfare, including the production and use of poison gases. Following the armistice, he and Meitner returned to atomic research. In 1934, Hahn began studying the recent work of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who had observed that bombarding uranium with neutrons produced a number of radioactive substances, which Fermi theorized were artificial elements similar to uranium. Hahn and Meitner, assisted by the chemist Fritz Strassmann, reached a different conclusion. In the midst of this work, however, in 1938, Meitner, a Jew, fled Germany to escape Nazi persecution, and Hahn carried on with Strassmann. At length, the two concluded that bombarding uranium with neutrons produced (among other products) the element barium. The only possible interpretation of this phenomenon was that the uranium atom had split into two lighter atoms. Conventional chemical theory held that atoms were irreducible and that one element could not, therefore, be converted to another. Hahn and Strassmann had demonstrated that atoms can be "split" (made to undergo fission) and that the result was the creation of atoms of a different, lighter element. After Hahn sent a report of the work to Meitner, she and her nephew Otto Frisch proposed an explanation of the process they called nuclear fission. . .

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