Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 through the combined work of several scientists, most notably Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner, and Otto Frisch.

Quick Scoop: Who Discovered Fission?

If you’re asking “who discovered fission,” the honest answer is that it was a team effort rather than a single genius moment.

  • Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann (chemists in Berlin) did the crucial experiments in late 1938, bombarding uranium with neutrons and unexpectedly finding barium among the products.
  • Lise Meitner (a physicist, and Hahn’s long‑time collaborator), who had fled Nazi Germany to Sweden, realized from their results that the uranium nucleus must be splitting into two large fragments.
  • Meitner’s nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, helped work out the physics and confirmed the interpretation experimentally; together they gave the process its name: “nuclear fission.”

So, in short:

  • Experimental discovery of fission products: Otto Hahn & Fritz Strassmann (1938).
  • Theoretical explanation and name “nuclear fission”: Lise Meitner & Otto Robert Frisch (1939).

A common textbook phrasing is that nuclear fission was “discovered by Hahn and Strassmann and explained by Meitner and Frisch,” capturing how both the lab work and the explanation were essential to the discovery we recognize today.

Bottom note: Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.