Robert Krohn was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin December 26, 1919. He attended the University of Wisconsin and graduated from the Electrical Engineering School in June of 1942. He had been deferred by the draft board in order to finish his bachelors degree and again following graduation so he could work with his professor H.B. Wahlin in the physics department to help with a project. The project he was working on turned out to be working on methods of canning either uranium or uranium oxide for a “pile” alongside Arthur Compton of Chicago University. Later he worked on canning uranium slugs.
In 1942, David Frisch approached Krohn to come to Los Alamos with him and eventually made his way there in April of 1943. In the meantime, Krohn and his colleagues did work on cross-sections on heavy metals which could be used as tampers for the bomb. While in Los Alamos, Krohn worked with Joe McKibben on the short tank and spent most of his time working on improvements for the Van de Graaff generator. After the bomb was designed and built, Krohn was pulled off of Van de Graaff to do instrumentation work for Trinity with his focus being: building, instrumentation and setting up neutron cameras.
After Trinity, Krohn went back to Wisconsin to get his graduate degree in physics and went on to briefly work at Barber Coleman Co. but later decided to return to Los Alamos to work for McKibben on Van de Graaff in 1946. Wanting to go back to working on weaponry, Krohn went to work for Marshall Holloway assigned to Sandia in what was then M Division (later M then WX Division) until 1949, where he was in charge of surveillance activity for the active materials stored for various bombs. In 1950, Krohn went back to Los Alamos and worked on “Mike” and was in charge of the assembly of the device in Eniwetok.
In 1953, Robert Krohn decided that the Laboratory in Los Alamos needed a museum to house historical weapon-research artifacts. Krohn convinced Norris Bradbury (Laboratory director, 1945-1970) that a museum could preserve the Laboratory’s history while at the same time providing a place for official visitors to learn about the Laboratory’s weapon programs. The museum now known as the Bradbury Museum, became opened to official visitors in 1954 and annually attracts about 110,000 visitors a year.
Robert Krohn passed away May 16, 2014