Corporate Involvement in the Manhattan Project

Cindy Kelly: It is Sunday, May 15, 2016, and we’re in Houston, Texas. I want to start by asking you to tell me your name and then spell it. Dorothy Ritter: My name is Dorothy Oley Ritter. D-O-R-O-T-H-Y O-L-E-Y R-I-T-T-E-R. Kelly: All right. Dorothy, why don’t we begin by having you tell us something about […]

Nate Weisenberg: My name is Nate Weisenberg. I am doing this interview for the Atomic Heritage Foundation with Kathleen Maxwell here in Wellesley, Massachusetts. It is Monday, April 25, 2016. How did you get involved with the Manhattan Project? Kathleen Maxwell: I had just finished my Master’s degree at Smith [College], and I was contemplating […]

Jersey City was home to the headquarters of the M. W. Kellogg Company, which specialized in chemical engineering projects. In 1942, the S-1 Committee tasked Kellogg with conducting research into the feasibility of the gaseous diffusion process for separating uranium isotopes. As the Manhattan Project began, Kellogg’s vice president of engineering, Percival “Dobie” Keith, took […]

Ed Wood: January 21, 1954 will go down as a significant day in human history. A milestone in man’s scientific progress. For on that day, at Groton, Connecticut, was launched the first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, powered by the world’s first atomic engine designed to do useful work. With this achievement, man at last has […]

[Many thanks to Claude Lyneis for donating this footage to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.] Narrator: About seventy-five miles northwest of Walla Walla, Washington, in an isolated expanse of open desert, civilization entered into a new age, an age from which it would never emerge the same. Here, in the home of the Wanapum Indians, the […]

Stephane Groueff: Dr. Raymond Grills, DuPont, Wilmington. Raymond Grills: I’m not sure just where we ought to start on explaining this, but perhaps we’ll explain it in this way. First off, the slug itself was a piece of metal, an inch to an inch-and-a-half in diameter and approximately five to six inches long. This material, […]

Donald Ross: My name is Donald Ross, and I am about to begin my eightieth year on this planet. I was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and I left there with my parents at an early age. We moved to the southern tip of Texas, and had a little farm not too far from Edinburg, Texas, […]

Crawford Greenewalt: Crawford Greenewalt. I’m named after my father, Crawford Hallock Greenewalt. The last name, Greenewalt, is spelled G-R-E-E-N-E-W-A-L-T. But in early years in the country, the Greenewalt’s spelled their name various ways. The present spelling may go back several generations. My father was born in 1902, in August. His mother was Mary Hallock, that […]

Nancy Greenewalt Frederick: My father, Crawford Greenewalt, was the only child of Dr. Frank Lindsay Greenewalt and Mary Hallock Greenewalt. Dr. Greenewalt was a physician at Gerard College in Philadelphia, and my father grew up there most of his young life. He went to a German school, what we would call a preschool, run by […]

Stephane Groueff: Interview with Dr. Clarence Larson—L-A-R-S-O-N—head of the Union Carbide’s operations at Oak Ridge, a chemist. Dr. Larson was connected with the electromagnetic separation process during the war, and he was a personal friend of Dr. Lawrence [Ernest O. Lawrence]. He’s married to the daughter of Dr. Stafford Warren, who was also with the […]