Nuclear Reactor

Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, USA, patent 2,708,656 of 1955. The pile under Chicago squash courts, patented after the war.

Overview

Fermi's team achieved the first controlled chain reaction in December 1942 under Stagg Field, wartime secrecy burying the news. The 1955 patent, filed 1944, named Fermi and Szilard for the neutron-reacting graphite pile. Postwar Atoms for Peace spread reactor designs abroad. Naval propulsion under Rickover, then 1957's Shippingport, lit the civilian era. Szilard had filed chain-reaction concepts secretly in 1934-40. The patent's government ownership shaped the entire civilian nuclear licensing structure.