Innovations

[Audio distortion occurs throughout the interview.] Stephane Groueff: Recording interview with Mr. Leon Love at Oak Ridge July 15, 1963. Mr. Love works with Y-12. Would you mind repeating sort of some of the characteristics of Y-12, some of the figures? For instance, how many buildings? How many magnets? How many Alpha [calutrons] and Beta […]

Stephane Groueff: Now it is recording Dr. Langsdorf. If you can tell me in a few words how you got connected with the project and where you came from. Alexander Langsdorf: Oh, in the first place, as soon as I got my PhD at MIT, I went out to Berkeley as a national research fellow […]

Cindy Kelly: I’m Cindy Kelly. This is Wednesday, June 24th, 2015, and I’m in Cambridge Massachusetts with Peter Gailson. My first question for you is to tell me your name and spell it. Peter Galison: My name is Peter Gailson, G-A-L-I-S-O-N. I’m a professor here at Harvard, Physics, a history of science. Twentieth century physics […]

Groueff: General Nichols, Part 2. Nichols: But Dobie [Percival Keith] came back immediately, or shortly thereafter, with the suggestion we build more gaseous diffusion base plants, and that was why we built the K-27 plant. Groueff: A base? Nichols: Yeah, a base. See, more base, to where he then optimized. How do you optimize the K-25 system with the […]

Kai Bird: Let us begin at the beginning and I think the viewers of this will want to know first about your own background. What year were you born? Bob Carter: I was born in 1920 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bird: On what day? Carter: February 3, 1920. Bird: 1920. Carter: Yes. Bird: Okay, 1920, what was sort of before modern physics, quantum […]

Raemer Schreiber: I think the only point that is of any interest in this regard to pick up is perhaps the fact that the group of us who came here to work on the so-called water boil reactor had been working together at Purdue University on the very first measurements of the so-called deuterium tritium […]

Joseph Katz: Now it was recognized that plutonium would have a chemistry that would be quite similar to that of uranium. And developing procedures for the separation of plutonium from irradiated uranium. The assumption that was most commonly made was that the chemistry of plutonium would be similar, if not identical to that of uranium […]

Stephane Groueff: Now you said that you had some opening remarks? William J. Sturm: Yes. In terms of what you would have said and what your colleagues have said you are interested in, it occurred to me to note that pretty generally insofar as the things that were done at Chicago are concerned—they were done […]

Stephane Groueff:  You personally you were in what department or building? You were directly working with Doctor [Arthur H.] Compton? Norman Hilberry: He called Dick Doan back in first. Dick had been one of his students. Well Mrs. H and Dick Doan had been, and Tom Johnson who is now with Raytheon, had been students […]

Stephane Groueff: One thing I don’t understand, and it’s a very ignorant question, but what was actually the difference between [Enrico] Fermi’s experiment in ’34 and [Otto] Hahn’s? Because, why do we say that Hahn was the first one, while Fermi also bombarded uranium? Lew Kowarski: I don’t it’s true to say that Hahn was […]