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The Square. It was easy enough for young Edward to excel the average. In early childhood he showed a gift for mathematics. "One of my earliest memories," he recalls, "is that I was put to bed earlier than I liked and then lay awake in the dark, amusing myself by figuring how many seconds there were in a minute, an hour, a day."
In his high-school days in Budapest, Teller was, as he puts it today, a "square" (pronounced, in his thick accent, "skvare"). Favorite amusements were chess, hiking, poetry and music. Among the subjects of his poems was a chum's brainy, grey-eyed younger sister, Mici (pronounced Mitzi), who shared young Teller's enthusiasm for mathematics and that special Hungarian passion, pingpong. Eventually they were married.
Like all young Hungarian scientists in those days. Teller took his Ph.D. in Germany (University of Leipzig). When Hitler took power in 1933, Teller was at Gottingen, pursuing research in the molecular structure of matter. With the anti-Semitism that darkened his childhood raging about him again, he eagerly grabbed at a British rescue mission's offer of a lecturer's post at London University. Two years later he moved on to the U.S. to take up a physics professor's duties at the District of Columbia's George Washington University.
Mici Teller recalls the stretch in Washington before World War 11 as the best years of their lives. "We had time to go to the movies and give parties," she says wistfully. "We do not have much time for that kind of thing now." Working with
Professor Gamow at George Washington. Teller studied thermonuclear reactions (fusion of hydrogen nuclei) in the stars. That pure-science undertaking was to have momentous consequences: it led to the development of the H-bomb.
Snarled Threads. Seven months before the outbreak of World War 11, scientists in the U.S. learned with alarm that physicists in Germany had succeeded in bringing about atomic fission. Shortly afterward, the U.S. incurred the first major installment of its massive debt to Hungarian-born scientists. Physicist Leo Szilard, leaping in thought from laboratory fission to atomic bomb, set out to urge the U.S. Government to get an atomic-research project going. Reasoning that a letter to President Roosevelt would have maximum impact if signed by Einstein, Szilard recruited his fellow Hungarian Edward Teller to chauffeur him out to Peconic Bay, N.Y., where Einstein was vacationing. Einstein signed, and the eventual result was the Manhattan Engineer District project that produced history's first atomic bomb.