Manhattan Project by Goodyear Tire to encase the reactor. On 2 December 1942, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiated the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in an experimental reactor known as Chicago Pile-1. The point at which a reaction becomes self-sustaining became known as "going critical". Compton reported the success to Conant in Washington, D.C., by a coded phone call, saying, "The Italian navigator [Fermi] has just landed in the new world." In January 1943, Grafton's successor, Major Arthur V. Peterson, ordered Chicago Pile-1 dismantled and reassembled at Red Gate Woods, as he regarded the operation of a reactor as
Enrico Fermi on Theoretical Physics began in Washington, D.C. under the joint auspices of George Washington University and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. There, the news on nuclear fission was spread even further, fostering many more experimental demonstrations. French scientists Hans von Halban, Lew Kowarski, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie had demonstrated that uranium bombarded by neutrons emitted more neutrons than it absorbed, suggesting the possibility of a chain reaction. Fermi and Anderson did so too a few weeks later. Leó Szilárd obtained of uranium oxide from Canadian radium producer Eldorado Gold Mines Limited, allowing Fermi and Anderson to conduct experiments with fission on