“We knew Einstein was somewhere on Long Island, but we didn’t know precisely where,” Szilárd recalled. So he phoned Einstein’s Princeton, New Jersey, office and was told he was renting the house of a Dr. Moore in the village of Peconic. On Sunday, July 16, 1939, they embarked on their mission with Wigner at the wheel (Szilárd, like Einstein, did not drive). But when they arrived, they couldn’t find the house, and nobody seemed to know Dr. Moore. Then Szilárd saw a young boy standing by the curb. “Do you, by any chance, know where Professor Einstein lives?” he asked. Like most people in town, the boy did, and he led them up to a cottage near the end of Old Grove Road, where they found Einstein lost in thought.
Sitting at a wooden table on the porch of the sparsely furnished cottage, Szilárd explained how an explosive chain reaction could be produced in uranium layered with graphite by the neutrons released from nuclear fission: Those neutrons would split more nuclei, and so on. “I never thought of that!” Einstein interjected. He asked a few questions and quickly grasped the implications. Instead of writing the Belgian queen, Einstein suggested, they should contact a Belgian minister he knew.
Wigner, showing some sensible propriety, suggested that three refugees should not be writing a foreign government about secret security matters without consulting the U.S. State Department. Perhaps, they decided, the proper channel was a letter from Einstein (the only one of them famous enough to be heeded) to the Belgian ambassador, with a cover letter to the State Department. With that plan in mind, Einstein dictated a draft in German. Wigner translated it, gave it to his secretary to be typed, and then sent it to Szilárd.
A few days later, a friend arranged for Szilárd to talk to Alexander Sachs, an economist at Lehman Brothers and a friend of President Roosevelt’s. Showing a bit more savvy than the three theoretical physicists, Sachs insisted that the letter go right to the White House, and he offered to hand-deliver it.
It was the first time Szilárd had met Sachs, but he found the bold plan appealing. “It could not do any harm to try this way,” he wrote to Einstein. Einstein wrote back asking Szilárd to come back out to Peconic so they could revise the letter. By that point Wigner had gone to California for a visit. So Szilárd enlisted, as driver and scientific sidekick, another friend from the amazing group of Hungarian refugees who were theoretical physicists, Edward Teller.
Szilárd brought with him the original draft from two weeks earlier, but Einstein realized that they were now planning a letter that was far more momentous than one asking Belgian ministers to be careful about Congolese uranium exports. The world’s most famous scientist was about to tell the president of the United States that he should begin contemplating a weapon of almost unimaginable impact. “Einstein dictated a letter in German,” Szilárd recalled, “which Teller took down, and I used this German text as a guide in preparing two drafts of a letter to the president.”
According to Teller’s notes, Einstein’s dictated draft not only raised the question of the Congo’s uranium but also explained the possibility of chain reactions, suggested that a new type of bomb could result, and urged the president to set up formal contact with physicists working on this topic. Szilárd then prepared and sent back to Einstein a 45-line letter and a 25-line version—both dated August 2, 1939—“and left it up to Einstein to choose which he liked best.” Einstein signed them both in a small scrawl.
The scientists still had to figure out who could best get it into the hands of President Roosevelt. Einstein was unsure Sachs could do the job. When Szilárd sent back to Einstein the typed versions of the letter, he suggested that they use as their intermediary Charles Lindbergh, whose solo transatlantic flight 12 years earlier had made him a celebrity. All three refugee Jews were apparently unaware that the aviator had been spending time in Germany, had been decorated the year before by Hermann Göring with that nation’s medal of honor, and was becoming an isolationist and Roosevelt antagonist.
