Herbert Anderson

Herbert Anderson was completing his graduate studies in physics in 1939 at Columbia University when he began a close scientific and personal asso­ciation with Enrico Fermi that was to continue until Fermi’s death in 1954. Anderson assisted Fermi in early research on nuclear fission, including Fermi’s direction of the first chain reaction. Anderson himself early in 1939 at Columbia, performed the experiment which resulted in the first observa­tion of fission in the United States. The two men worked together at the Argonne Forest near Chicago on design features of the Hanford reactors.