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1. Teller was born in Budapest into a Jewish family.
2. He reportedly did not speak at an early age but developed a fascination with numbers.
3. He emigrated to Germany in 1926 due to discrimination and the revolutions in Hungary.
4. While he was a young student in Munich his right foot was severed in a street car accident which necessitated a prosthetic foot and left him with a pronounced limp.
5. Teller graduated with a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Karlsruhe and received a PhD in physics at the University of Leipzig.
6. His PhD dissertation was one of the first accurate quantum mechanical reports of the hydrogen molecular ion.
7. He spent a summer in Rome with the physicist, Enrico Fermi which strengthened his interest in nuclear physics.
8. In 1933 the International Rescue Committee helped him escape from Germany to England and then to Denmark where he worked under Niels Bohr.
9. In 1935 he was invited to become a Professor Physics at George Washington University and he became a U.S. citizen in 1941.
10. In 1952 Teller was invited to be part of the summer planning project for the Manhattan Project.
11. In June of 1942 Teller joined the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago along with Arthur Compton and Enrico Fermi.
12. In April 1943 he moved to Los Alamos laboratory to work with Robert Oppenheimer and others in designing an atomic bomb.
13. In 1945 he became one of the few scientists to actually watch the first test detonation in July 1945.
14. In 1955 he was encouraged by Fermi to write an article titled "The Work of Many People" for Science magazine. Unfortunately, in his memoirs he retracted the article and claimed full credit for the invention of the hydrogen bomb.
15. From 1958 to 1960, Teller worked as the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
16. In 1975 Edward Teller was named director emeritus of Livermore. He was the associate director until 1977. He received the Albert Einstein Award, the National Medal of Science award the Enrico Fermi Award.
17. In 1979 Teller had a heart attack. He blamed it on Jane Fonda.
18. In 1982 he became a member of the White House Science Council.
19. Teller was given one of the first Ig Nobel Prizes for Peace in 1991.
20. In 2001 a book Teller wrote about his life, Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey In Science And Politics, was published by Basic Books. Teller was 93.
21. He died from a stroke on September 9, 2003, in Stanford California at the age of 95. He was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom less than two months before his death.
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