George De Hevesy Quotes

Out of the prospering but vulnerable Hungarian Jewish middle class came no fewer than seven of the twentieth century’s most exceptional scientists: in order of birth, Theodor von Kármán, George de Hevesy, Michael Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller.

He even found time on the day of the occupation to worry about the large gold Nobel Prize medals that Max von Laue and James Franck had given him for safekeeping.1290 Exporting gold from Germany was a serious criminal offense and their names were engraved on the medals.1291, 1292 George de Hevesy devised an effective solution—literally: he dissolved the medals separately in acid. As solutions of black liquid in unmarked jars they sat out the war innocently on a laboratory shelf.

He even found time on the day of the occupation to worry about the large gold Nobel Prize medals that Max von Laue and James Franck had given him for safekeeping.1290 Exporting gold from Germany was a serious criminal offense and their names were engraved on the medals.1291, 1292 George de Hevesy devised an effective solution—literally: he dissolved the medals separately in acid. As solutions of black liquid in unmarked jars they sat out the war innocently on a laboratory shelf. Afterward the Nobel Foundation recast them and returned them to their owners.

Working with Bohr in Copenhagen was the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy, who in 1923 had discovered the element hafnium, naming it after the Latin for the city, ‘Hafnia’. Hevesy first suggested that they bury the medals, but Bohr felt it was too likely they would be discovered. Instead, as Nazi troops flooded into the city, he set about dissolving them in aqua regia–with some difficulty, he complained later, as there was a considerable amount of gold and it was reluctant to react even with this strong acid. The Nazis took over the Institute for Theoretical Physics and carefully searched Bohr’s laboratory, but omitted to enquire as to the contents of the bottles of brown liquid on a shelf, which remained there undisturbed for the duration of the war. After the war, Bohr wrote a letter to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences accompanying the return of the medal gold explaining what had happened to it. The gold was recovered, and the Nobel Foundation duly minted new medals for the two physicists.