Enrico Fermi to be nuclear fission products. Fermi left Italy in 1938 to escape new Italian racial laws that affected his Jewish wife, Laura Capon. He emigrated to the United States, where he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Fermi led the team that designed and built Chicago Pile-1, which went critical on 2 December 1942, demonstrating the first human-created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. He was on hand when the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, went critical in 1943, and when the B Reactor at the Hanford Site did so the next year. At Los Alamos, he
Enrico Fermi of 37 for his "demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons". After Fermi received the prize in Stockholm, he did not return home to Italy, but rather continued to New York City with his family in December 1938, where they applied for permanent residency. The decision to move to America and become U.S. citizens was due primarily to the racial laws in Italy. Fermi arrived in New York City on 2 January 1939. He was immediately offered posts at five universities, and