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 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
At Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, featured Bethe, Christy, Reines, and Mark on the theoretical physicist's view of the Laboratory's operation, c. 1943-1945, including: reasons for participation; division of labor between and relationsh...
At the Kennedy Maxwell Productions studio featured Black, Bolling, Larson, and Livingston on the plant operators' lives and work at Oak Ridge, c. 1943-1949, including: living conditions during and after construction; layout of Oak Ridge and Clinton Eng...
Transcript, pp. 1-62, of videotape recording, 2 hours, 20 minutes. [Note: Session 15 was taped on two separate recorders, which resulted in two distinct set of images on tapes. The audio, however, is the same. Only one tape is necessary to view the int...
At the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., featured Agnew, Ashworth, Ramsey, and Sweeney on their assignments in Project Alberta, c. 1944-1945, including: designing the Fat Man plutonium bomb, contents and aerodynamics; definition of...
Interviewees in this collection contributed in various roles to the refinement of uranium 235 isotope at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Built
concurrently with the Hanford Reservation, the Clinton complex was designed for continued research and the refinement of the fissionable isotope uranium 235 from uranium 238.
The sessions were shot at a studio of Kennedy Maxwell Productions, and on-site at the Y-12 Electromagnetic Separation Plant and the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Participants for Session Four were instrumental in designing and running the nuclear reactors at Oak Ridge and Hanford. Dale F. Babcock received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry
at the age of twenty-three from the University of Illinois in 1929. Du Pont employed his services as a research chemist until 1942, when he became a technical specialist on
the explosive potential of plutonium. Before the war, Lyle B. Borst stayed at the University of Chicago as a Research Associate after his doctoral studies in physics. In 1943
he was appointed chief physicist of the Clinton Laboratories near Oak Ridge, where he remained until 1946. Edward C. Creutz received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin
in 1939, taught physics at Princeton University, and joined the Manhattan Project as a group leader between 1942 and 1946. After he received his M.A. from Columbia University
in 1939 Albert Wattenberg was a spectroscopist for Schenley Products, Incorporated. He spent a year with the Office of Scientific Research and Development at Columbia University
before moving to the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago as a group leader under Enrico Fermi in January 1942.
Alvin M. Weinberg, born in 1915, earned his three degrees in physics at University of Chicago by 1939. He stayed there during the war at the Metallurgical Laboratory and
moved to Oak Ridge in 1945. Eugene P. Wigner was born in Hungary in 1902. He earned his doctorate in physics at the Technical University of Berlin in 1925 and came to the
United States at the behest of Princeton five years later. Together with Leo Szilard he played a key role in sparking President Franklin D. Roosevelt's interest in atomic
power, and during the war he designed the Hanford reactors. Wigner won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1963.
The four participants of Session Five helped operate the isotope separation machinery designed by the physicists and engineers. Colleen Black was nineteen years old when
she arrived in July 1944 and was assigned to find pipe leaks at the K-25 Plant. The other three worked in the Y-12 Plant. Connie Bolling was teaching at Coburn High School,
Virginia, in 1943 when he gave six weeks' notice to join a government project that, in his understanding, was to end the war. He trained cubicle and vacuum pump operators
and remained after 1945 in the effort to maximize calutron output. Jane W. Larson arrived in September 1943 as a historian, before switching to technical editor, reporting
on the effort to maintain vacuum consistency. She also worked part-time for the Oak Ridge Journal. Audrey B. Livingston, born in 1926, started in 1944 as a cubicle operator.
Participants for Session Six helped design, build and operate the calutrons in the Y-12 Plant. George M. Banic, Jr., worked on high voltage power supplies for the General
Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, and came to Oak Ridge in March 1944, to help with the stable isotope program. He stayed after the war to continue isolating isotopes
at the pilot plant until it closed in 1975. Clarence E. Larson and Robert S. Livingston received their Ph.D.s from the University of California at Berkeley and continued their
research at the Radiation Laboratory there until 1943. Larson took charge of the technical staff at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge through 1950 when he became director of the
Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Livingston oversaw Stone and Webster Engineering Corporation's design of the Y-12 Plant and continued working at Oak Ridge until his retirement
in 1981. John M. Googin sought out a position in nuclear chemistry while finishing his B.S. at Bates College in Maine. He started work at Oak Ridge as a process chemist in
the summer of 1944, assisting in the recycling of uranium waste. Chris P. Keim received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Nebraska in 1940. In 1944 he left his
fellowship at the Mellon Institute to become a research physicist for the stable isotope program at the pilot plant. Keim continued working at Oak Ridge until his retirement
in 1971.
Session Seven participants helped design and operate the K-25 Plant for the gaseous diffusion of uranium 235. Paul R. Vanstrum and James A. Parsons majored in chemical
engineering at Columbia University where they participated in the manufacture of part of the diffusion barrier. Vanstrum began working for Union Carbide Corporation, the K-25
operating contractor, after graduation and transferred to Oak Ridge in August 1944. He stayed at the K-25 Plant until it closed in 1964. Parsons continued to work on the manufacture
of diffusion barriers in New York until September 1944, when he went to Oak Ridge as a foreman. Paul Huber also had a degree in chemical engineering and began work at Oak
Ridge in 1944.
Goldberg focused discussions on the theory and practice of reactor construction; nature of the workload; living conditions; and security measures at Oak Ridge. The sessions
were shot on one-inch tape and provided visual documentation of the Y-12 and K-25 plants, and calutron components, as well as period photographs of Oak Ridge.
Collection Citation:
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 9531, The Manhattan Project Videohistory Collection
