Lise Meitner

Out of the 118 elements known today, only six were discovered by women, Lise Meitner being one of those six women.  

Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in 1912, a few years into their 30-year working relationship.

Written by Kate Buckridge

Out of the 118 elements known today, only six were discovered by women, Lise Meitner being one of them. Women had a very difficult time proving themselves in the scientific world in the past due to the idea that women were destined for household duties. The few women that were able to work were also not taken seriously. This is where Lide Meitner was in the world, a woman that was not taken seriously for many years before her work was accepted. 

Lise Meitner was an Jewish, Austrian physicist born November 7, 1878. Her immediate family consisted of eight siblings and her parents, Philipp and Hedwig Meitner. She was always interested in science as a child and went to get a private education since women at the time were unable to get any higher than a simple secondary school at the time. She took schooling easily and was one of the first women in the University of Vienna to get a doctorate. She got her doctorate in physics in 1906 and went to Berlin to study with Max Planck and Otto Hahn. Hahn and Meitner worked together for 30 years, researching radioactivity. Meitner and Hahn worked well together since she knew physics and he knew chemistry – the perfect combination for making amazing discoveries. Eleven years after they started working together, Hahn and Meitner discovered element number 91, Protactinium. While she was not the first woman to discover an element, this discovery was very important for women. It proved that women could be seen as serious, important people in male dominated fields of work such as science. Then, five years later, she discovered the radiationless transition known as The Auger effect. This was named after Pierre Victor Auger, a man that discovered the same thing two years after Mietner. 

Lise Meitner late in life (Photograph: Sara Darling)

Since she was Jewish, It became too dangerous for Mietner to live in Germany in the late 1930s. She left and settled safely in Sweden in 1938 and continued her research there. Her research in Sweden at Stockholm was somewhat unaided due to the sexism she faced as a woman in STEM. Still, she continued to work with what she had and completed new experiments with Hahn. This is when nuclear fission was first introduced to the world. Nuclear fission is simply when atoms are split apart and release energy, which is commonly used at nuclear power plants. 

Hahn was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry while Meitner was neglected and pushed aside in 1944. Hahn is partially to blame since he published the work instead of Meitner and made her seem less involved in the work than she was. This sexist error in scientific history was not acknowledged until 20 years later. Today, Lise Meitner is known as the woman who discovered the element Protactinium and Nuclear Fission. Her contributions to the scientific world are still seen today. The damage that the anti-semitic and sexist world she was forced to work and live in is still affecting her name and legacy.

Sources

AtomicArchive. “Lise Meitner | Biographies.” Www.atomicarchive.com, www.atomicarchive.com/resources/biographies/meitner.html.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Lise Meitner | Biography & Facts.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 6 Feb. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/Lise-Meitner.