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National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Howard “Howie” Wilcox was an American physicist. He studied at the University of Minnesota and was a teaching fellow at Harvard when he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He went together with his wife, Evie Wilcox, who worked as a machinist at Los Alamos. He later remembered, “As a result of that experience I became totally (though unconsciously) imbued with the knowledge and attitude that just about any reasonable technical objective can be realized in just a few months by a motivated team of knowledgeable young people guided by progress- and results-oriented managers backed up with adequate financial support from on high.”

 

After the war, Wilcox went with Enrico Fermi to the University of Chicago where he earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. He went on to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He also worked at the Naval Ordnance Test Station in China Lake, California.

 

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