Ernest Lawrence a scrap of a paper napkin. While sitting in the library one evening in 1929, Lawrence glanced over a journal article by Rolf Widerøe, and was intrigued by one of the diagrams. This depicted a device that produced high-energy particles by means of a succession of small "pushes". The device depicted was laid out in a straight line using increasingly longer electrodes. At the time, physicists were beginning to explore the atomic nucleus. In 1919, the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford had fired alpha particles into nitrogen and had succeeded in knocking protons out of some of the nuclei. But
History of nuclear weapons alpha particles; Enrico Fermi reported similar results when bombarding uranium with neutrons. In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to "Naturwissenschaften" reporting that they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch correctly interpreted these results as being due to the splitting of the uranium atom. (Frisch confirmed this experimentally on January 13, 1939.) They gave the process the name "fission" because of its similarity to the splitting of a cell into two new cells. Even before it was published, news of Meitner’s and Frisch’s interpretation