Background
Edward Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. His parents were Ilona (born Deutsch), a pianist, and Max Teller, an attorney.
1945
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Some of the American scientists who were instrumental in developing the atom bomb gather to celebrate the opening the 'Institute of Nuclear Studies and Institute of Metals' at the University of Chicago. Seated l to r; W H Zachariasen, Harold C Urey, Cyril Smith, Enrico Fermi and Samuel K Allison. Standing l to r; Edward Teller, Thorfin Hogness, Walter Zinn, Clarence Zener, Joseph E Mayer, Philip W Schutz, R H Christ and Carl Eckhart.
1946
Physicists at a Manhattan District-sponsored colloquium at Los Alamos on the Super in April 1946. In the front row are (left to right) Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi, and J. M. B. Kellogg. Robert Oppenheimer, in dark coat, is behind Manley; to Oppenheimer's left is Richard Feynman. The Army officer on the left is Colonel Oliver Haywood.
1963
Edward Teller, so-called Father of the H-Bomb, is shown as he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Opposing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Teller said it is not a 'step toward peace' but a step 'away form safety and possibly a step toward war.' Members of the Senate Armed Services and Atomic Energy Committees also were in attendance for the hearings.
1963
DC: Dr. Edward Teller, called the 'Father of the H-bomb,' is shown as he addressed the National Press Club. In his speech, Teller renewed his opposition to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, challenging the effectiveness of U. S. military intelligence upon which 'men of the highest responsibility' base their beliefs that the U.S. is stronger and has more knowledge than Russia.
Edward Teller of the University of California; Mr. Robert Poole; Dr. Oscar Morgenstern of Princeton University; Dr. Lawrence; Admiral Briscoe; Dr. Herbert York, Director of Livermore Laboratory; Rear Adm. J.T. Hayward, USN of the office of the Chief of US Naval Operations; Mr. W.A. Reichel and Dr. Donald Cooksey, Associate Director of the radiation laboratory of the University of California.
1945
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Some of the American scientists who were instrumental in developing the atom bomb gather to celebrate the opening the 'Institute of Nuclear Studies and Institute of Metals' at the University of Chicago. Seated l to r; W H Zachariasen, Harold C Urey, Cyril Smith, Enrico Fermi and Samuel K Allison. Standing l to r; Edward Teller, Thorfin Hogness, Walter Zinn, Clarence Zener, Joseph E Mayer, Philip W Schutz, R H Christ and Carl Eckhart.
1946
Physicists at a Manhattan District-sponsored colloquium at Los Alamos on the Super in April 1946. In the front row are (left to right) Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi, and J. M. B. Kellogg. Robert Oppenheimer, in dark coat, is behind Manley; to Oppenheimer's left is Richard Feynman. The Army officer on the left is Colonel Oliver Haywood.
1963
Edward Teller, so-called Father of the H-Bomb, is shown as he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Opposing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Teller said it is not a 'step toward peace' but a step 'away form safety and possibly a step toward war.' Members of the Senate Armed Services and Atomic Energy Committees also were in attendance for the hearings.
1963
DC: Dr. Edward Teller, called the 'Father of the H-bomb,' is shown as he addressed the National Press Club. In his speech, Teller renewed his opposition to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, challenging the effectiveness of U. S. military intelligence upon which 'men of the highest responsibility' base their beliefs that the U.S. is stronger and has more knowledge than Russia.
1987
Italy
Pope John Paul II greets Edward Teller at the 1987 World Peace Conference in Italy.
Physicist Edward Teller blowing soap bubbles in his laboratory with physicist Hans A. Bethe looking on.
Edvard Teller in his youth.
Edvard Teller was named as part of the group of "U.S. Scientists" who were Time magazine's People of the Year in 1960.
Teller became a major lobbying force of the Strategic Defense Initiative to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
Edward Teller in his later years.
Teller's ID badge photo from Los Alamos.
Physicist Edward Teller and Harold Brown
Edward Teller at a Dinner
Edward Teller of the University of California; Mr. Robert Poole; Dr. Oscar Morgenstern of Princeton University; Dr. Lawrence; Admiral Briscoe; Dr. Herbert York, Director of Livermore Laboratory; Rear Adm. J.T. Hayward, USN of the office of the Chief of US Naval Operations; Mr. W.A. Reichel and Dr. Donald Cooksey, Associate Director of the radiation laboratory of the University of California.
(A controversial scientist offers personal reflections on ...)
A controversial scientist offers personal reflections on physicists such as Einstein, Szilard, and Fermi, views of the events at Los Alamos and the Oppenheimer affair, and his stance on arms control and nuclear policy.
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Shield-Than-Sword-Perspectives/dp/0029324610/?tag=2022091-20
1987
(Edward Teller is perhaps best known for his belief in fre...)
Edward Teller is perhaps best known for his belief in freedom through strong defense. But this extraordinary memoir at last reveals the man behind the headlines - passionate and humorous, devoted and loyal. Never before has Teller told his story as fully as he does here. We learn his true position on everything from the bombing of Japan to the pursuit of weapons research in the post-war years. In clear and compelling prose, Teller chronicles the people and events that shaped him as a scientist, beginning with his early love of music and math, and continuing with his study of quantum physics under Werner Heisenberg. He also describes his relationships with some of the century's greatest minds - Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Szilard, von Neuman - and offers an honest assessment of the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the founding of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and his complicated relationship with J. Robert Oppenheimer.
https://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Twentieth-Century-Journey-Science-Politics/dp/0738207780/?tag=2022091-20
2001
lecturer physicist scientist invetor
Edward Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. His parents were Ilona (born Deutsch), a pianist, and Max Teller, an attorney.
Edward Teller studied in the Fasori Lutheran Gymnasium, then in the Minta (Model) Gymnasium in Budapest. Like Einstein and Feynman, Teller was a late talker. He developed the ability to speak later than most children, but became very interested in numbers, and would calculate large numbers in his head for fun.
Teller graduated in chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe and received in 1930 his Ph.D. in physics under Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. Teller's dissertation dealt with one of the first accurate quantum mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecular ion.
During the years of the Weimar Republic, Teller was absorbed with atomic physics, first studying under Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and then teaching at the University of Göttingen (1931–33). In 1935 Teller and his bride, Augusta Harkanyi, went to the United States, where he taught at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Together with his colleague George Gamow, he established new rules for classifying the ways subatomic particles can escape the nucleus during radioactive decay. Following Bohr’s stunning report on the fission of the uranium atom in 1939 and inspired by the words of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had called for scientists to act to defend the United States against Nazism, Teller resolved to devote his energies to developing nuclear weapons.
By 1941 Teller had taken out U.S. citizenship and joined Enrico Fermi’s team at the University of Chicago in the epochal experiment to produce the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Teller then accepted an invitation from the University of California, Berkeley, to work on theoretical studies on the atomic bomb with J. Robert Oppenheimer; and when Oppenheimer set up the secret Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico in 1943, Teller was among the first men recruited. Although the Los Alamos assignment was to build a fission bomb, Teller digressed more and more from the main line of research to continue his own inquiries into a potentially much more powerful thermonuclear hydrogen fusion bomb. At war’s end he wanted the U.S. government’s nuclear weapons development priorities shifted to the hydrogen bomb. Hiroshima, however, had had a profound effect on Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists, and few had the desire to continue in nuclear weapons research.
Teller accepted a position with the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago in 1946 but returned to Los Alamos as a consultant for extended periods. The Soviet Union’s explosion of an atomic bomb in 1949 made him more determined that the United States have a hydrogen bomb, but the Atomic Energy Commission’s general advisory committee, which was headed by Oppenheimer, voted against a crash program to develop one. The debate was settled by the confession of the British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs that he had been spying for the Soviet Union since 1942. Fuchs had known of the American interest in a hydrogen bomb and had passed along early American data on it to the Soviets. In response, Pres. Harry Truman ordered the go-ahead on the weapon, and Teller laboured on at Los Alamos to make it a reality.
Teller and his colleagues at Los Alamos made little actual progress in designing a workable thermonuclear device until early in 1951, when the physicist Stanislaw Marcin Ulam proposed to use the mechanical shock of an atomic bomb to compress a second fissile core and make it explode; the resulting high density would make the burning of the second core’s thermonuclear fuel much more efficient. Teller in response suggested that radiation, rather than mechanical shock, from the atomic bomb’s explosion be used to compress and ignite the thermonuclear second core. Together these new ideas provided a firm basis for a fusion weapon, and a device using the Teller-Ulam configuration, as it is now known, was successfully tested at Enewetak atoll in the Pacific on November 1, 1952; it yielded an explosion equivalent to 10 million tons (10 megatons) of TNT.
Teller was subsequently credited with developing the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, and he became known in the United States as “the father of the H-bomb.” Ulam’s key role in conceiving the bomb design did not emerge from classified government documents and other sources until nearly three decades after the event. Still, Teller’s stubborn pursuit of the weapon in the face of skepticism, and even hostility, from many of his peers played a major role in the bomb’s development.
At the U.S. government hearings held in 1954 to determine whether Oppenheimer was a security risk, Teller’s testimony was decidedly unsympathetic to his former chief. “I would feel personally more secure,” he told the inquiry board, “if public matters would rest in other hands.” After the hearings’ end, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was revoked, and his career as a science administrator was at an end. Although Teller’s testimony was by no means the decisive factor in this outcome, many prominent American nuclear physicists never forgave him for what they viewed as his betrayal of Oppenheimer.
Teller was instrumental in the creation of the United States’ second nuclear weapons laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, California, in 1952. For almost the next four decades it was the United States’ chief factory for making thermonuclear weapons. Teller was associate director of Livermore from 1954 to 1958 and from 1960 to 1975, and he was its director in 1958–60. Concurrently he was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1953 to 1960 and was professor-at-large there until 1970.
Teller died in Stanford, California on September 9, 2003, at the age of 95. He had suffered a stroke two days before and had long been suffering from a number of conditions related to his advanced age.
(A controversial scientist offers personal reflections on ...)
1987(Edward Teller is perhaps best known for his belief in fre...)
2001Jewish of origin, later in life Teller became an agnostic Jew. "Religion was not an issue in my family", he later wrote, "indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years."
A staunch anticommunist, Teller devoted much time in the 1960s to his crusade to keep the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in nuclear arms. He opposed the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, and he was a champion of Project Plowshare, an unsuccessful federal government program to find peaceful uses for atomic explosives. In the 1970s Teller remained a prominent government adviser on nuclear weapons policy, and in 1982–83 he was a major influence in President Ronald Reagan’s proposal of the Strategic Defense Initiative, an attempt to create a defense system against nuclear attacks by the Soviet Union. In 2003 Teller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In his later years, Teller became especially known for his advocacy of controversial technological solutions to both military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using thermonuclear explosive in what was called Project Chariot. He was a vigorous advocate of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
Quotations:
"There is no case where ignorance should be preferred to knowledge - especially if the knowledge is terrible."
"I don't want to kill anybody. I am passionately opposed to killing, but I'm even more passionately fond of freedom."
"By having simplified what is known, physicists have been led into realms which as yet are anything but simple."
"Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution."
"The preservation of peace and the improvement of a lot of all people require us to have faith in the rationality of humans."
"If we stay strong, then I believe we can stabilize the world and have peace based on force."
"By having simplified what is known, physicists have been led into realms which as yet are anything but simple."
Edward Teller was elected a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences in 1948. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Nuclear Society.
Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality and is considered one of the inspirations for the character Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 movie of the same name.
Physical Characteristics:
While a student in Munich, Teller fell under a moving streetcar and lost his right foot, which was replaced with an artificial one.
Fermi once said that Teller was the only monomaniac he knew who had several manias.
Quotes from others about the person
"It would have been a better world without Teller." - Isidor I. Rabi
In February 1934, he married his long-time girlfriend Augusta Maria "Mici" Harkanyi, the sister of a friend. They had 2 children.