Smithsonian Institution. Office of the Secretary Search this
Extent:
2 cu. ft. (2 record storage boxes)
Type:
Collection descriptions
Archival materials
Manuscripts
Brochures
Clippings
Color photographs
Date:
1987-1998
Descriptive Entry:
This accession consists of records documenting the Enola Gay exhibition controversy at the National Air and Space Museum during the tenure of Smithsonian Institution
Secretary Ira Michael Heyman. The initial proposed exhibition was titled Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War and later
retitled Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II. Materials include correspondence, memoranda, and notes; meeting agendas and minutes; public inquiries;
reports; newspaper clippings and articles; news transcripts; and various versions of the exhibition script.
In Sessions One through Three, Collins and Tatarewicz interviewed three participants to review the development of aerial reconnaissance photography between 1940
and 1970. In this period engineers had to develop cameras, lenses, shutters, and film for use at ever higher altitudes and usually at higher velocities. The United States
benefitted from the improvements at the tactical level in World War II and in the Korean War, and at the strategic level in surveying nuclear capability in the Soviet Union
and Cuba. Sessions were recorded at Amrom Katz's home, in Santa Monica, California, and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Session One's participant, Amrom Katz, contributed to the field throughout the period discussed. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin before
beginning work for the U.S. government in 1938. From 1940 to 1954 he mastered approaches to aerial photography at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and led
the photographic missions for the Bikini Island atomic bomb tests and the Inchon invasion in 1950. In 1954 he joined the senior staff at RAND, concentrating further on the
related issues of aerospace surveillance, arms control and the institutional attitudes that help and hinder these processes.
In Sessions Two and Three, Katz was joined by two other aerial reconnaissance experts. Merton E. Davies completed his B.A. and graduate studies in mathematics at Stanford
University in 1938. After ten years of design and engineering work for Douglas Aircraft, he joined RAND's engineering department. His research on satellite reconnaissance
photography led not only to its development for military intelligence purposes, but for arms control verification and extraterrestrial exploration as well. Walter Levison
received a B.A. in physics at City College of New York before joining Katz at Wright-Patterson and the Bikini tests during and after World War II. Although he never worked
directly for RAND, Levison spent the 1950s researching and directing the development of camera and lens technology at Boston University's Physical Research Laboratories for
the Air Force surveys of the Soviet Union. Levison continued in this field with the Laboratories and Itek Corporation until 1974.
The discussions detailed technological and methodological developments in photoreconnaissance. The sessions provide visual documentation of high-altitude cameras and photography and the tools of photointerpretation.
Collection Citation:
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 9536, The Research and Development (RAND) Corporation Videohistory Collection
29 videotapes (Reference copies). 75 digital .wmv files and .rm files (Reference copies).
Type:
Collection descriptions
Archival materials
Videotapes
Transcripts
Place:
Trinity Test Site (N.M.)
Hiroshima-shi (Japan) -- History -- Bombardment, 1945
Nagasaki (Japan)
Nagasaki-shi (Japan) -- History -- Bombardment, 1945
Date:
1987-1990
Introduction:
The Smithsonian Videohistory Program, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation from 1986 until 1992, used video in historical research. Additional collections have
been added since the grant project ended. Videohistory uses the video camera as a historical research tool to record moving visual information. Video works best in historical
research when recording people at work in environments, explaining artifacts, demonstrating process, or in group discussion. The experimental program recorded projects that
reflected the Institution's concern with the conduct of contemporary science and technology.
Smithsonian historians participated in the program to document visual aspects of their on-going historical research. Projects covered topics in the physical and biological
sciences as well as in technological design and manufacture. To capture site, process, and interaction most effectively, projects were taped in offices, factories, quarries,
laboratories, observatories, and museums. Resulting footage was duplicated, transcribed, and deposited in the Smithsonian Institution Archives for scholarship, education,
and exhibition. The collection is open to qualified researchers.
Descriptive Entry:
Stanley Goldberg, consulting historian for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH), recorded eighteen video sessions with fifty-five participants
involved in the engineering, physics, and culmination of the Manhattan Project. Goldberg examined the research and technologies necessary to realize the uranium and plutonium
bombs. He supplemented interviews with visual documentation of the industrial plants that refined and separated the isotopes, and of the machinery that delivered and dropped
the bombs. Interviewees explained the other steps of designing, building, testing and detonating an atomic bomb. Discussions with participants also elicited a social history
of the Project as recalled by various men and women responsible for different duties in different locales. Between January 1987 and June 1990 the sessions were recorded on-site
or in-studio in Hanford, Washington; Boston, Massachusetts; Oak Ridge and Louisville, Tennessee; Alamogordo and Los Alamos, New Mexico; Washington, D.C.; and Suitland, Maryland.
The sessions are divided into five series: Hanford, Oak Ridge, Cambridge, Los Alamos, and Alberta.
This collection consists of eighteen interview sessions, separated into five series, totaling approximately 47:00 hours of recordings, and 1188 pages of transcript.
Please note that Sessions 14 and 15 in Series Four are comprised of dual sets of tape from two cameras positioned at different angles.
Historical Note:
The United States government began underwriting investigations of the feasibility of atomic weapons in October 1941. Within a year, promising research at several universities,
particularly at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, showed that it was possible to produce atomic bombs based on the chain-reacting fission of uranium
235 isotope or of plutonium. This led to the reorganization of the Manhattan District, or "Project," of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to make these bombs a reality. Brigadier
General Leslie R. Groves directed and coordinated the Project from 1942 to 1945, spending 2.3 billion dollars on nuclear reactors and chemical separation plants at Hanford,
Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and on the weapon research and design laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The first plutonium bomb was successfully detonated at Alamogordo,
New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The B-29 bomber Enola Gay exploded the first uranium bomb, "Little Boy," over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945; the B-29 Bock's Car
exploded the second plutonium bomb, "Fat Man," over Nagasaki, Japan, two days later.
At the Audvid Film and Tape Productions studio, featured French, Frisch, Serber, and Wilson on the organization of Los Alamos and the scientific activities there, c. 1943-1945, including: rationale for forming the Laboratory and considerations for site...
Interviewees in this collection also contributed to the atomic bomb design and testing program in New Mexico. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist from the University
of California at Berkeley charged with supervising this part of the Manhattan Project, picked the Los Alamos location because of its isolation and its beauty. The sessions
were shot at the Trinity test site and in a Los Alamos conference room.
The participants in Session Thirteen worked on the Trinity test at different levels of responsibility. Kenneth T. Bainbridge administered the test from site selection to
the write-up of the official report. He came to Los Alamos in the summer of 1943, having previously worked on radar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in England;
he had also designed and built Harvard University's first cyclotron. Robert Wilson was not yet thirty when he arrived at Los Alamos in April 1943, where he headed various
subgroups using cyclotron research. Wilson had come directly from a Ph.D. at Berkeley and a teaching and cyclotron research post at Princeton. During the Trinity test he helped
install the bomb and measured implosion and fission behavior during the explosion.
Session Fourteen participants worked at various levels on the theoretical underpinnings of an atomic weapon. Hans Bethe, head of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos,
left Germany in 1933 for Cornell University before applying his research to the war effort in 1940. He gave up his work on explosives and radar in July 1942 when he became
convinced of the feasibility of an atomic bomb. Bethe returned to Cornell after the war and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967. Frederick Reines made his reputation as
a doctoral student at New York University when he developed a new equation in applied mathematics. Reines joined the Theoretical staff in late 1943 and remained at Los Alamos
as a Group Leader until 1959. Canadian J. Carson Mark came to Los Alamos via research at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago and a doctorate under Oppenheimer at Berkeley.
Fellow Canadian Robert Christy arrived by way of George Placzek's Montreal study group and summer seminars in applied mathematics at Brown University in 1941 and 1942.
In addition to Bainbridge, Session Fifteen included experimentalists Robert Bacher and Norris E. Bradbury, and administrator David Hawkins. Bacher led fission studies at
Cornell and worked at MIT's Radiation Laboratory before heading the Experimental and Gadget Divisions at Los Alamos. His opposition to militarized working conditions manifested
itself further in his post-war efforts for civilian control of nuclear research. Bradbury put his Berkeley Ph.D. to work at the U.S. Navy's Dahlgren Proving Ground for four
years before his assignment to the Ordnance Division at Los Alamos. He replaced Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in September 1945. Hawkins grew up in
New Mexico and went to Berkeley to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy. He returned as administrative assistant to Oppenheimer in the summer of 1943, becoming the primary liaison
between the scientists and the military administration of the Project.
Goldberg elicited comparisons of the work experience from the theoretical and experimental physicists as well as discussions of social life at Los Alamos. The series was
shot on half-inch Betacam tape and provides visual documentation of the Trinity test site, Los Alamos in 1989, and period photographs of Los Alamos and preparations for the
Trinity test.
Collection Citation:
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 9531, The Manhattan Project Videohistory Collection
Four participants from "Project Alberta" convened for Sessions Seventeen and Eighteen. This phase of the Manhattan Project dealt with the conversion of the Trinity
test device into the practical weapons systems that were used twice on Japan. The interviewees were among those who designed the bombs to fit the B-29, wired them with redundant
electronics, rehearsed the mission, established a base on Tinian Island, and released the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sessions were shot at the National Museum
of American History in Washington, D.C., and at the National Air and Space Museum's Paul E. Garber Facility in Suitland, Maryland.
Norman F. Ramsey, Jr., received his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in 1940. During World War II, Ramsey consulted with various government groups concerned with
military technology. In 1943 he moved from the offices of the Secretary of War to Los Alamos, where he became a group leader for bomb delivery. After the war, he returned
to Columbia and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1989. Harold M. Agnew received his A.B. in chemistry from the University of Denver in 1942. His advisor referred him to
Enrico Fermi, under whom his responsibility was for some of the measurements of the atomic explosions over Japan. After the war Agnew earned his Ph.D. in particle physics
at the University of Chicago before returning to Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. He directed the Laboratory there from 1970 to 1979.
Frederick L. Ashworth graduated from the United States Naval Academy and completed the Naval Postgraduate School course in ordnance engineering shortly before the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. After service in the Pacific Theater of Operations, he worked for William S. Parsons and Norman F. Ramsey on the detonation components of the
atomic bombs. Ashworth acted as weaponeer on the Nagasaki mission and as General Groves' representative on Tinian Island. His book, The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, was published in 1947. Charles W. Sweeney was born in 1920 and grew up in eastern Massachusetts. He enlisted as an air cadet in April 1941, and rose to commander
of a bomber squadron in the European Theater of Operations. With nearly three thousand hours of accident-free flight time to recommend him, Sweeney joined Colonel Paul Tibbetts'
509th Composite Group of B-29's in September 1944. He piloted an observation plane at the Hiroshima bombing and dropped the "Fat Man" over Nagasaki from Bock's Car. After
he completed his enlistment, he returned to Massachusetts to begin a wholesale leather business and served in the Air National Guard until 1976.
Goldberg used the Enola Gay site to draw from the participants details of their involvement with the technologies of Project Alberta. Other questions stimulated
recollections of experiences on Tinian Island and on the two missions to Japan. The sessions were shot with half-inch Betacam tape and provide visual documentation of the
Little Boy and Fat Man bomb models and the B-29 Enola Gay.
Collection Citation:
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 9531, The Manhattan Project Videohistory Collection
Interviewees in this series contributed in various roles to the refinement of plutonium 239 isotope at the Hanford Engineer Works in the state of Washington. In
January of 1943, General Groves chose the site for construction of three full-scale plutonium piles for the mass production of plutonium 239--an isotope for the chain reaction
in an atomic bomb--as well as water-treatment plants for cooling the reactors. The E.I. Du Pont de Nemours Company also built four remote-controlled "canyons" for the chemical
separation of plutonium from uranium 238. Sessions were shot at the Columbia Cable Television studio and on-site at the Hanford Reservation.
Participants for Session One assisted in operations at the "B" site nuclear reactor as operators or support personnel. Lawrence Denton began work at the Hanford construction
camp in September 1942 as a receiving and shipping clerk. Wilson A. Cease came to Hanford as a Du Pont employee in March 1944, and worked as a security patrolman in the area
where uranium slugs were canned and sealed. Jess R. Brinkerhoff and Ralph K. Wahlen were both employed by the Remington Arms plant in Salt Lake City, Utah, and transferred
to Hanford. Brinkerhoff arrived in November 1943, and worked in the fire department before becoming a power operator in a water treatment plant. Wahlen was employed in the
fuel piece canning area. R.M. Buslach arrived in Hanford after the war and worked in plant maintenance for the General Electric Company.
Session Two participants worked for the Du Pont Company as chemical engineers at Hanford. Wakefield A. Wright and Vivian Russell Chapman were first transferred from Alabama
Ordnance Works by Du Pont to the Manhattan Project facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for training before arriving in Hanford in 1944. William P. McCue was employed at the
Oklahoma Ordnance Works before training at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois, and relocating to Hanford. The responsibilities of these three men at Hanford
included training the crews and supervising the operators in the nuclear reactors and chemical separation plants.
Session Three brought together a group of Hanford administrators. Oswald H. Greager had been a chemist for Du Pont after receiving his Ph.D. in that field from the University
of Michigan in 1929. He came to Hanford in October 1944, from the Separations Development Division at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Greager, on military
duty at Hanford, served as Technical Officer and supervised the work of the contractor in the chemical separation area. Richard F. Foster joined the project in September 1943,
on a contract with the Office of Scientific Research and Development at the University of Washington College of Fisheries. He studied the effects of radiation on the Columbia
River and eventually became concerned with evaluating radiological doses received by people from all environs at Hanford. Leonard F. Perkins, Sr., came to Hanford in the spring
of 1944 as an employee of the United States General Accounting Office to audit the contract of the Du Pont Company. In 1946, he transferred to the Atomic Energy Commission
and returned to Hanford in 1951 to direct government-contracted construction there until 1973. During World War II Frederic W. Albaugh worked in the Metallurgical Laboratory
at the University of Chicago as a group leader in the plutonium chemistry section. He arrived in Hanford to head its plutonium chemistry section in 1947 and continued to work
there in various administrative capacities until 1971. Colonel Franklin T. Matthias, who had worked under General Groves in construction contracting for the Pentagon, was
largely responsible for the site selection of Hanford. Groves appointed Matthias in February of 1943 to be commanding officer of the Hanford facilities.
The discussions detailed the nature of the workload at Hanford, the living conditions, and the administration of the Project. The sessions were shot on three-quarter-inch
U-matic tape and provided visual documentation of the "B" site nuclear reactor, tools used for the charge/discharge process, and period photographs of the interiors of the
chemical separation "canyons."
Collection Citation:
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 9531, The Manhattan Project Videohistory Collection
Interviewees in this collection worked on the physics of atomic bomb design at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. The sessions were taped at the
studios of Audvid Film and Tape Production, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Four physicists who played important roles in the "Trinity" atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, were reunited for Session Nine. Kenneth Bainbridge, a physicist
at Harvard University, designed and built the Harvard cyclotron which was used at Los Alamos. In 1940 he joined the radar research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), and soon after went to Cambridge University in England to work on radar and uranium experiments. He was recruited for the Manhattan Project and moved to Los Alamos
in the summer of 1943. In March 1944, he took charge of the Trinity test and administered it from site selection to detonation. Donald F. Hornig, also a physicist at Harvard
before he joined the Los Alamos staff, designed the high-voltage capacitors that fired the Fat Man's multiple detonators. Philip Morrison received his Ph.D. in theoretical
physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1940, and worked on the Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago before arriving at Los
Alamos in 1944 to serve as Physicist and Group Leader. Robert Wilson had recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley and taught at Princeton University
before he arrived in Los Alamos in April 1943. He headed various subgroups engaged in cyclotron research for the Trinity test.
Session Ten participants worked at Los Alamos with different levels of responsibility. Robert Wilson and Robert Serber were Division Leaders. Serber received his Ph.D.
from the University of Wisconsin in 1934, and worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer as a Research Associate at the University of Chicago's "Met Lab" before arriving at Los Alamos.
Serber's introductory lectures on the physics and chemistry of the Project in April 1943 became the Los Alamos Primer.
Anthony French received his A.B. in physics from Cambridge University. Before coming to Los Alamos in 1944, he worked at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. David H. Frisch
was still a graduate student when he arrived at Los Alamos as a Junior Physicist in 1943. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1947.
Four women from Los Alamos convened to discuss their professional and domestic lives in Session Eleven. Lilli S. Hornig received her M.A. in chemistry from Harvard in 1943
and her Ph.D. in 1950. From 1944 to 1946 she served as Staff Scientist in the plutonium chemistry division at Los Alamos, and as Section Leader for high explosives development.
Rose E. Frisch received her Ph.D. in physiological genetics from the University of Wisconsin in 1943. At Los Alamos, she monitored the effects of radiation in the medical
laboratory. Alice Kimball Smith received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University and taught social studies at Los Alamos High School. After the war she served as historian
for the Association of Los Alamos Scientists. Her book, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America 1945-1947, was published in 1965. Jane S. Wilson also
taught at the Los Alamos High School.
Physicists who worked on the implosion program gathered for Session Twelve. Bernard T. Feld worked at the Met Lab at the University of Chicago before coming to Los Alamos
in 1944. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in 1945. Cyril Smith received his D.Sc. in metallurgy from MIT in 1926. He served as associate division
leader in metallurgy at Los Alamos from 1943 to 1946. Robert Serber and Philip Morrison appeared again in this interview.
Goldberg encouraged discussion of the culture and the workload at Los Alamos, and the attitudes towards that work and its consequences.
Collection Citation:
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 9531, The Manhattan Project Videohistory Collection
National Air and Space Museum. Exhibits Design Division Search this
Extent:
4 cu. ft. (4 record storage boxes)
Type:
Collection descriptions
Archival materials
Manuscripts
Clippings
Brochures
Architectural drawings
Floor plans
Sketches
Color photographs
Color transparencies
Color negatives
Black-and-white negatives
Black-and-white photographs
Date:
1972-2006
Descriptive Entry:
This accession consists of records documenting the design of new exhibitions for display at the National Air and Space Museum as well as updates to existing exhibitions.
The majority of the records were created and maintained by William Jacobs, Exhibits Designer. Exhibitions documented in this accession include Where Next, Columbus?;
Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (proposed), Dream to Fly: Black Aviators and American Identity (proposed); Space Race; Air Transportation;
Vertical Flight; Air Traffic Control; Business Wings; Flight Testing; How Things Fly; Looking at Earth; Explore the Universe;
Rocketry and Spaceflight; Sea-Air Operations; and Exploring the Planets. Materials include correspondence, memoranda, budgets, conceptual sketches, scripts,
installation images, images to be used in exhibitions, contracts, floor plans, elevations, brochures, meeting minutes, notes, clippings, and related materials.
Rights:
Restricted for 15 years, until Jan-01-2022; Transferring office; 9/29/2009 memorandum, Wright to Brennan; Contact reference staff for details.
Folder 37 Daily Mail Report, January 4, 1948. Story about "a mousetrap atomic bomb"; photographs of lobster packaging and an electric fish screen unit.
Folder 25 Correspondence and draft scripts for Watson Davis appearance on Part 4 of "You and the Atom" (CBS radio mini-series), July 25, 1946. Background materials include: copy of a J. Robert Oppenheimer speech; May 15 issue of Bulletin of Atomic Scie...
Drafts and final versions of speeches and articles by Watson Davis; background material for lectures; correspondence on related topics; proofs and correspondence
for Atomic Bombing: How to Protect Yourself (1950), written by Davis and other Science Service staff members.
Collection Citation:
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7091, Science Service, Records
Folder 14 Atomic Bombing: How to Protect Yourself, 1950. Correspondents include Louise C. Guthman; includes book contract, advertisements, and jacket; government pamphlets about how to survive an atomic attack, and copy of June 1950 series "Our Atomic ...
![view Folder 37 Daily Mail Report, January 4, 1948. Story about "a mousetrap atomic bomb"; photographs of lobster packaging and an electric fish screen unit. digital asset: Flying Lobsters. [Image no. SIA2016-014243]](https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?max=170&id=https://sirismm.si.edu/siris/electronicresource.gif "Flying Lobsters. [Image no. SIA2016-014243]")
![View Folder 37 Daily Mail Report, January 4, 1948. Story about "a mousetrap atomic bomb"; photographs of lobster packaging and an electric fish screen unit. digital asset: Flying Lobsters. [Image no. SIA2016-014243]](https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?max=120&id=https://sirismm.si.edu/siris/electronicresource.gif "Flying Lobsters. [Image no. SIA2016-014243]")
