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National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Victor C. Hamister

ConsultantChicago, IL

Manhattan Project VeteranProject Worker/StaffScientist

Victor C. Hamister was a consultant to the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory (“Met Lab”) during the Manhattan Project. At the Met Lab, Hamister gave lectures to the scientists and research associates.

On February 13, 1890, Victor Carl Hamister was born in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1916, graduated from The University of Wisconsin with a B.S. in chemical engineering. Two years later, he married Bessie Irene Sutherland, who also graduated from The University of Wisconsin in 1916. 

According to Lauchlin Currie’s interview on the Voice of the Manhattan Project website, Hamister was “an old time, run-a-mine graphite man, knew about making graphite.” Hamister worked with Herbert G. MacPherson under Currie at the National Carbon Company. 

Hamister and MacPherson co-wrote The Production and Properties of Graphite for Reactors (1955), which was the first declassified book on nuclear reactor graphite. 

At the age of seventy-one, Victor C. Hamister died in Lakewood, Ohio in October of 1961.

 

For more information about Victor C. Hamister, please see the following references:

Victor C. Hamister’s Timeline
1890 Feb 13th Born in Cleveland, Ohio.

1912 Apr 27th Elected into the American Electrochemical Society.

1916 Graduated from the University of Wisconsin.

1918 Married Bessie Irene Sutherland

1955 Published: The Production and Properties of Graphite for Reactors.

1961 Oct At the age of seventy-one, died in Lakewood, Ohio.

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