The men tried to patent the idea, but met with resistance from the government and the patent courts. As Fisk would recall, the reason was that the physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard “had essentially the same idea and probably at about the same time. We may have been earlier, they may have been earlier, I don’t know. I don’t think that anybody will ever know. But they were working hard on this and we were doing this simply as an exercise to answer the question.”
