German chemist Otto Hahn had a clear career path ahead of him, in industrial chemsitry. But when recruiting him, the Chemische Fabrik Kalle & Co made it a condition that he acquire a better level in English, to facilitate the expansion of the company abroad. He therefore left for London, in the laboratory of William Ramsay, discoverer of rare gases (helium, neon, krypton, xenon ... as this chemical family was known at that time) and who was to receive the Nobel Prize in chemistry a few weeks after Hahn joined his team, at the end of 1904.

   But Hahn did not only improve his language skills : without ever having handled any radioactive material before landing on the banks of the Thames, he quickly succeeded in mastering the radium purification technique developed by Marie Curie. .

   Such a rare talent interested Ernest Rutherford, who brought him to Montreal at the start of the academic year in October 1905 (despite his reluctance to hire a young man trained by Ramsay, whose coup with rare gases had only been followed by absurd ideas... which he tried each time to pass for the invention of the century).

   Hahn loved this Quebec experience alongside Rutherford, so much so that Chemische Fabrik Kalle never saw him take the position ha had been planned to take.

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   The positive point for the young chemist was that he developed over the following decades a whole section of science which was later referred to as "nuclear chemistry" (although we must not forget the role played by Bertram Boltwood and Frederick Soddy in this area, nor the invaluable help that the physicist Lise Meitner gave him, once he was installed in Berlin). His investment finally earned him the 1944 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission; discovery largely attributable to Lise Meitner... who was not invited to share this honor.

    During the rise of Nazism and the war, Hahn remained in Germany without adhering to the Nazi theses (unlike Philipp von Lenard, promoter of Deutsche Physik, a movement which opposed the ideas of Einstein and other representatives of "Jewish science"). He also refused to participate in the work on the atomic bomb wanted by Hitler (unlike Hans Geiger ) and, furthermore, he dare to help his Jewish colleagues (unlike, again, Geiger, who did not lift a finger for its own employees).

    According to Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn was “one of the few to remain upstanding and to do their best during those dreadful years."