1. Niels Bohr worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, which eventually led to the development of the first atomic bomb. Before this, he worked in London with the equivalent nuclear weapons program known as Tube Alloys.
2. Soccer was important to Bohr, and he even played on a college team. However, his brother outshone him greatly in soccer and even played in the Olympics in 1908.
3. Bohr had six sons with wife Margrethe, but two of them died during his lifetime.
4. The Institute of Theoretical Physics, which Bohr founded, was sponsored by the famous Danish brewery, Carlsberg.
5. Because his mother was Jewish, Bohr was forced to escape Nazi-occupied Denmark to Sweden, making the trip on a fishing boat.
6. The chemical element Bohrium (atomic number 107) is named after Bohr.
7. Like his father, Aage Bohr also won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975.
8. While in the United States, Bohr went by the name of “Nicholas Baker” for security issues.
9. In 1950, Bohr wrote an “Open Letter” to the United Nations, pressing for peaceful and controlled use of nuclear weapons.
10. Bohr believed in sharing scientific discoveries with the international scientific community, including the Soviet Union. As a result, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill became very suspicious of Bohr and thought of him as a security threat.
