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Title: George Hevesy Scientific Correspondence, 1910-1966

ID: 01/02/001

Creator: Hevesy, George (1885-1966)

Extent: 11.0 Boxes

Arrangement:

Alphabetical after correspondent, then chronological.

The collection consists of 11 boxes, in part photocopied from other collections.

The photocopies come from Dirk Coster Correspondence, Groningen; Kasimir Fajans Correspondence, SPKB, Berlin; James Franck Correspondence, Chicago; Lise Meitner Correspondence, Cambridge; Stefan Meyer Correspondence, Austria; Meyerhof Correspondence, BSC supplement NBA, Copenhagen; Fritz Paneth Papers, Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft,  Berlin-Dahlem: Ernest Rutherford Correspondence, Cambridge; Johannes Stark Correspondence, SPKB, Berlin.

The entire collection is microfilmed (16 microfilms).  The Finding Aid describes the microfilmed version of the collection, available at the Niels Bohr Archive.

Languages: German [ger], Danish [dan], Swedish [swe], English [eng]

Hevesy's own collection of scientific correspondence supplemented with material from other archives, collected by Hilde Levi. Covers all aspects of his career. Approx. 1000 letters, 120 corrrespondents. Correspondents include: Francis William Aston, Karl Auer Von Welsbach, Jana Böhm, Niels Bohr, Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted, James Chadwick, Dirk Coster, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Kasimir Fajans, James Franck, Hans Wilhelm Geiger, Victor Moritz Goldschmidt, Fritz Haber, Otto Hahn, Otto Hönigsschmidt, Valdemar Thal Jantzen, Frederic Joliot, Ernest Lawrence, Hilde Levi, Lise Meitner, Stefan Meyer, Otto Meyerhof, Joseph Needham, Yoshio Nishina, Joseph K. Parnas, Hans Petterson, Robert Robison, Ernest Rutherford, Rudolf Schoenheimer, Frederick Soddy, Johannes Stark, Harold Clayton Urey, Francis Preston Venable.  The correspondence with Fritz Paneth is particularly rich.

Working in Lord Rutherford's laboratory in Manchester (1913) this Hungarian-born scientist initiated the method of radioactive indicators as a tool in chemical analysis. After the First World War he spent six years at Niels Bohr's Institute in Denmark and, together with the Dutch physicist D. Coster, discovered a hitherto unknown element which was given the Latin name of Copenhagen: "Hafnium". In the 1930s Hevesy returned to Copenhagen and developed the tracer technique in biological and medical research using artificially produced radioactive isotopes. The wide applicability of this technique triggered spectacular advances in the life sciences and many other branches of science and technology. Hevesy was awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1944.

Processing Information: Contents of each item described in English on a notecard. List of correspondents and letters. Microfilmed, 16 microfilms, including 5 microfilms of Paneth correspondence from Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem.