Category Archives: Science > Physics

It is well known that the United States produced the first nuclear bomb in 1945. However, less well known are the women who contributed their talents to make this event a reality. Physicist Leona Woods Marshall Libby was one of the women who helped to create the atomic weapon. She worked on the team that constructed the first nuclear chain reaction leading to the development of the bomb.

Hertha Wambacher was an Austrian physicist who studied first chemistry, then physics at the University of Vienna.
Wambacher’s dissertation at the 2nd Physics Institute was supervised by Marietta Blau, with whom Wambacher would continue to collaborate after completing her Ph.D. in 1932. They worked together on the photographic method of detecting ionizing particles. Blau and Wambacher received the Lieben Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1937, for their studies at Vienna’s Institute for Radium Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. That same year, Blau and Wambacher jointly discovered “disintegration stars” in photographic plates that had been exposed to cosmic radiation at an altitude of 2300 m above sea level. These figures are the patterns of particle tracks from nuclear reactions (spallation events) of cosmic-ray particles with nuclei of the photographic emulsion.