The Emilio Segrè Collection

The Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (ESVA) is named after Italian physicist Emilio Segrè and is made up of many unique collections from a variety of sources, including donations from physicists and their families as well as from institutions. Within the ESVA, the similarly named Segrè Collection may be considered the flagship collection. The Segrè Collection features photos from throughout Segrè’s life, including many personal photos and photos he took himself, as he was an avid photographer from the age of 10. Because of his position as a preeminent physicist working in a time of fast, ground-breaking developments, this means we have an inside look at the lives and work of some of the most well-known physicists of the 20th century.

The ESVA and the Segrè Collection itself might not exist, however, without the influence of Segrè’s second wife, Rosa. After Emilio’s death in 1989, Rosa approached the Niels Bohr Library and Archives about creating a memorial photo library. NBLA had been collecting photos since our founding in 1962, including photos from Emilio himself, but they weren’t consistently arranged and described for researcher access. NBLA determined that with a modest gift, we could make serious progress on photo preservation efforts, including placing negatives in cold storage, creating a database of names of people represented so the collection could be searched, and publishing a periodical brochure of updates to the physics community. Rosa agreed, and the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives was established in 1992.

A few years later, in 1997, Rosa unexpectedly died in a car accident in Tivoli, Italy. In her will, she left to NBLA Emilio’s personal photo collection and the rights to his photos and writings. That donation of approximately 700 photographs makes up the bulk of the Segrè Collection as it is organized today.

Over the past few months, we have been undergoing a migration to a new digital repository that will make it easier for researchers to access photographs in the ESVA. For this month’s Photos of the Month, in honor of the launch of our new system, I wanted to walk through Emilio’s life and the Segrè Collection with you, highlighting some of the lesser-known gems found in this unique and valuable collection.

A lot of the research for this post came from Emilio’s autobiography, “A Mind Always In Motion.” Published posthumously by Rosa and indexed in detail, it is available for free through the California Digital Library. It is an endearing read, full of personal stories and first-hand accounts of some of the most important moments in 20th century nuclear physics. I highly recommend checking it out.

Early Life and Education

Emilio Segrè, known to friends and family as Pippi, was born on January 30, 1905, in Tivoli, Italy, just outside of Rome. This date is of some controversy, as he recounts in his autobiography: “My father reported my arrival to the civil authorities later than prescribed by law, and to avoid complications, I was registered as having been born on February 1, which became my official birthday.” (pg. 2) Although the family moved to Rome just before Emilio started high school, Tivoli retained a special place in his heart throughout his life.

When Emilio was 10, he came down with scarlet fever. During his long recovery, his uncle Claudio gave him a Kodak Brownie camera, and he learned how to take photos, develop film, and make prints. Thus began the lifelong love of photography for which he was well-known.

Emilio completed his schooling in Rome, including a degree in physics at the University of Rome La Sapienza, where he studied with Enrico Fermi. Upon his graduation in 1928, he joined the army as mandated by Italy’s conscription laws. He was sent to an officer’s training school in Spoleto, then commissioned to serve in the anti-aircraft artillery. He was stationed at Forte Braschi, near Rome, so he was able to keep in contact with Fermi and the others from La Sapienza. In his autobiography, he tells a story of being urgently called from Forte Braschi to the Physics Institute at Via Panisperna:

Early Career

After completing his mandated service, Emilio continued his physics studies with Fermi and the other scientists at La Sapienza (a group that included Oscar D’Agostino, Edoardo Amaldi, and Franco Rasetti, and came to be known as the Via Panisperna Boys ). He also traveled around Europe on fellowships to work with eminent physicists like Pieter Zeeman in Amsterdam and Otto Stern in Hamburg.

Emilio made his first visit to the United States in 1933, when Fermi invited him to accompany him to the University of Michigan’s summer school in Ann Arbor. He made another trip to Ann Arbor in 1935, and then another in 1936 en route to Ernest Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley.

During the1936 trip, he was joined by his first wife, Elfriede (neé Spiro). The couple met in 1934, when Elfriede was new to Italy. German by birth, as a Jew she was forced to emigrate to Italy in 1933 when the Nazi party came to power. She didn’t know Italian, but Emilio was fluent in German, so they were able to converse. Emilio affectionately called her “La Spiro.”

The couple married on February 2, 1936. Emilio tells the story in his autobiography:

Emilio and Elfriede were married for nearly 40 years, until 1970 when Elfriede died peacefully in her sleep during a visit to Italy, where they were considering resettling after Emilio retired.

Back to their summer 1936 trip to the United States: Emilio and Elfriede (who was pregnant with their first child, Claudio – named for the uncle who gave Emilio his first camera) traveled by train from New York to Ann Arbor and on to Berkeley. After Emilio finished his work with Lawrence’s lab, the couple rented a car and spent some time traveling around the Western U.S., including Yosemite, Death Valley, the California and Arizona deserts, and the national parks in Utah. Emilio of course had his camera (by this point he had upgraded to a Leica ) to document the whole trip.

Emilio would end up spending a good portion of his early career working with or at the Berkeley lab. Beginning with the 1936 visit, Lawrence shipped samples of radioactive material to Italy for Emilio to work on at home (he was a faculty member at the University of Palermo by this point), which led to the discovery of technetium in 1937 (although it wasn’t named until a decade later).

In 1938, Emilio was visiting Lawrence’s lab once again when Benito Mussolini’s fascist government passed a series of laws that effectively banned Emilio from returning. He sent for Elfriede and Claudio, and they became indefinite émigrés. Emilio got a job at Lawrence’s Radiation Lab, where he spent the next several years.

Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project

Because of the nature of his work with radioactive elements, Emilio got tapped by J. Robert Oppenheimer for the Manhattan Project in 1942 and the family moved to Los Alamos in 1943. There he reunited with Enrico Fermi, who had similarly been displaced from Italy by its fascist regime and had been working on nuclear energy since he arrived in New York in 1939. Although Fermi was not permanently stationed at Los Alamos, he made frequent visits.

Both Fermi and Emilio were very outdoorsy, and they took advantage of the geography around Los Almos to organize group trips for hiking, skiing, and fishing. Emilio recounts this story of teaching Fermi to fish:

The Staub family in particular became close friends of the Segrès. Hans, a Swiss physicist, bonded with Emilio over fishing and other outdoor activities; Elfriede and Erika became friends; and the Staub children were similar in age to Claudio and Amelia (the Segrè’s first daughter, born in 1942; they had a second daughter , Fausta, in 1945).

Emilio recounts the end of the war in his autobiography:

Emilio ended up making a lot of portraits of physicists over his life; in fact, he was quite well-known for it. In a letter to NBLA after his death, his daughter Amelia told us, “I remember well some of the portraits my father made of famous physicists using his famous Leica.” You can view those portraits in the Segrè Collection .

Post WWII

After the war, Emilio returned to Berkeley, this time with a full professorship. In what can only be chalked up to “those were different times back then,” he let young Claudio drive part of the way back to California:

Once (miraculously, safely) back in Berkeley, he picked back up on his work at the Radiation Lab, especially on nucleon-nucleon collisions. Around 1955, Emilio and his working group, which included Owen Chamberlain, Clyde Wiegand, and Tom Ypsilantis , decided to work on the problem of proving the existence of the antiproton. They began their first run on August 25, 1955, and almost immediately began observing antiproton signals. The experiment concluded on October 1, 1955, and was deemed a success.

Emilio began receiving awards, honors, and invitations to lecture all over the world. Finally, on October 26, 1959, he received word that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics . Even though the work was done by multiple people, the Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award the prize only to Emilio and Chamberlain, as the first two named authors on the publication.

The whole family traveled to Stockholm for the ceremonies. Emilio recounts the story, including how he acquired his wardrobe for the event:

Retirement and Later Life

Emilio spent the next years traveling the world, giving speeches, attending White House dinners, and generally doing what Nobel laureates do. By the 1960s, he started stepping back from active scientific work, as he believed “the scientific profession belongs to youth.” (pg. 283)

In 1966, he and Elfriede visited South America, where some of his family had settled during WWII. In Montevideo, Uruguay, they met Rosa Mines, a friend of his cousins. She asked the Segrès if they would provide an affidavit to help her immigrate to the U.S.; Emilio was reluctant, but Elfriede liked her and agreed to sign.

As mentioned, Elfriede died suddenly in 1970. Rosa sent a letter of sympathy, and a couple of years later, she and Emilio married. Emilio doesn’t give any details about how their marriage came to be, but he says this:

Rosa and Emilio continued to travel, spending more time in Italy, especially Tivoli. Emilio spent several years teaching short courses at the Accademia dei Lincei and the University of Rome, until he reached the Italian mandotory retirement age. In 1981, at the age of 76, he embarked on a tour of Tuscany, primarily by foot, railway, and public transportation, with his friend and fellow physicist Giuseppe Occhialini .

Emilio’s autobiography ends on his 77^th birthday, but in an afterword, Rosa tells us how the story truly ends:

Epilogue

I hope you enjoyed this trip through Segrè’s life and photos. There are so many more photos to explore in the Segrè Collection that there simply wasn’t space for here. I’ve included a gallery of a few of my favorites below, but I encourage you to check out the rest in our new repository.