Corporate Involvement in the Manhattan Project

[Interviewed by Cynthia Kelly and Tom Zannes.] Tell us your name. Louis Turner: My name is Louis Turner.  L-O-U-I-S T-U-R-N-E-R. I’m a metallurgical engineer. Graduated in 1941 from the Colorado School of Mines. I was working in Denver Ordnance Plant when I was asked if I would go to Chicago by DuPont. They wouldn’t tell […]

Arthur Squires: Keith is a personality. Stephane Groueff: He is kind of a personality. Squires: Keith is a personality and I worked with this man seventeen years, shy two weeks. Groueff: So you know him very well.                    Squires: I know him very well. Groueff: Would you […]

Arthur Squires: And I probably did not appreciate, during the war itself, the extent to which this was such a remarkable effort. Kellex – I am sure some of this you have already heard. Kellex was put together by M.W. Kellogg Company pretty much on a command basis. They just went to the top people […]

Groueff: Hello? Hello? Recording, San Francisco, Berkeley, February 9, 1965. Robert Thornton: Well my first connection with the radiation laboratory was in about 1933 when I came here on a post-doctoral fellowship because it was not long before then. And I then was working with Professor [Ernest] Lawrence and others on the development on the […]

Gilbert Church: During the construction period there were several fellows that I could suggest you see. One of them would be Phil Gardner, for example. He was a recruiter on the road, and that was one of the biggest problems that we had, was getting manpower. He would know all the detail of that. So […]

Sir Hugh Taylor: I had been requested by the British Government to find out certain things. They wanted, for example, to know whether they could use this thing and the General Electric Company made it available to them on the condition that their affiliate in England was entrusted with the responsibility of supplying it. It […]

Groueff: And so you have the tank. You have all these military things. And then you finally got the atomic bomb. Keller: Yes. Groueff: What date did [General Leslie] Groves come to you? Keller: That is all in the book. Groueff: That was in ’43. Keller: You will get that all out of the book. […]

Stephane Groueff: Hello, recording January 19, 1965, Florida, Coral Gables. Mr. Hobbs, H-O-B-B-S. J.C. Hobbs: I was born in West Virginia, just west of Pittsburgh up in the panhandle. My father and mother were both educators and in 1893 I was five years old, we came to Florida. He was an educator and also an […]

Keller: My father was a very poor boy. And, in fact, their family had been broken up when he was eleven years of age. And he was indentured to a Mennonite preacher farmer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania who raised him. And when he was twenty, he went into business as a horse dealer in the […]

Stephane Groueff: We could start now with your biography and where you were born. I see that you were born in Cleveland. General Kenneth Nichols: Well, I was born in a little suburb of Cleveland called West Park, Ohio [on November 13, 1907]. Groueff: West Park, Ohio. Nichols: Later became a part of Cleveland. Groueff: […]