Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)

Papers from the Second International Conference on the History of Chemistry and Chemical Industry (Eger, Hungary, 16–19 August, 1995) - Palló, Gábor: Early Research on Radioactivity in Hungary

ther did the Radium Station. It was attached directly to the faculty with an uncertain status. The rigid structure of the university impeded the normal institutionalization of the new field, but a strange, unorthodox solution could have been found. This status, however, had always been disadvantageous. The history of the Radium Station was a perpetual struggle for survival. It always lacked the necessary means and authority.

7 Career patterns of the researchers This peripheral position did not give a good chance for a successful scientific career for the researchers. Almost all of the young doctors left the field after achieving some promising results. Throughout its history, this first lab has been closely knitted to the local knowledge market. The more ambitious students studied at other places, like in the Veterinary School. Some even more ambitious students learned in Western scientific centers. This was not unusual at all, as the previous generation often did the same. The unusual phenomenon was that, unlike their predecessors, some of them decided to stay abroad. The scientific emigration from Hungary started from the field of radioactivity. Béla Szilárd, who had no relationship to Leo Szilárd, can be considered a forerunner of the great generation that formed the first migration wave. He left the country for Paris in 1907 and became a collaborator of the Curie-lab. Later he established a little workshop for radioactive measurement devices in Paris. He spent the first World War in the University of Madrid, and used his instruments to determine the radioactive contents of different Spanish minerals. In 1925, one year before his early death, he got the Legion d'Honeur for his scientific achievements. Szilárd wrote the first book on radioactivity in Hungary.

8 Another first was Irén Götz, who studied in the Curie-lab for a while also. She became the first woman, who ever taught in a Hungarian University. Since this happened under the early communist era of Béla Kun, and since her husband was a well-known leftist, they both had to flee from the country after the revolution. First they went to Berlin, then to Moscow, and she died in a prison of Stalin in the early forties.

9 George Hevesy graduated in the University of Freiburg and became a student of Ernest Rutherford in Manchester. He received the Nobel-prize from chemistry in 1943 for his work on radioactive indication, which was based ot his works conducted in 1913. This was carried out in Vienna and Budapest simultaneously. In his crucial year of 1913, he commuted between the Viennese "Institute für Radiumforschung" and the Budapest University. He had scientific relationships to all the significant European centers of