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 theory of beta decay, his work with non-linear systems, his discovery of the effects of slow neutrons, his study of pion-nucleon collisions, and his Fermi–Dirac statistics. His speculation that a pion was not a fundamental particle pointed the way towards the study of quarks and leptons. Many things bear Fermi's name. These include the Fermilab particle accelerator and physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, which was renamed in his honor in 1974, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which was named after him in 2008, in recognition of his work on cosmic rays. Three nuclear reactor installations have been named after