Everything about Egon Bretscher totally explained
Born near
Zurich, Switzerland in 1901 and educated at the
ETH there, Bretscher gained a PhD degree in organic chemistry at
Edinburgh in 1926. 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. In 1944 he became a part of the British Mission to the
Manhattan Project in
Los Alamos, New Mexico led by
James Chadwick, where he made the first measurements on the energy released in fusion processes.
In 1947 he was invited by
John Cockcroft to head the Chemistry Division at the newly established
Atomic Energy Research Establishment at
Harwell, Oxfordshire, England and in 1948 succeeded
Otto Frisch as head of the Nuclear Physics Division there. Amongst his colleagues were
Bruno Pontecorvo (in the Nuclear Physics Division) and
Klaus Fuchs (head of the Theoretical Physics Division). He was awarded a CBE on retirement from Harwell and died in Switzerland in 1973.
He used to joke that his main contribution to physics occurred in the 1920s, when he was climbing with another student
Felix Bloch in the
Swiss Alps. 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. Bloch later won the
Nobel Prize for physics for his discovery of
nuclear magnetic resonance.
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