Innovations

Cindy Kelly: Okay I am Cindy Kelly, Atomic Heritage Foundation and we are in Mesa, Arizona on June 26, 2013 and with me is Robert or Bob Cantrell. And the first question I have for him is to tell me his name and spell it. Bob Cantrell: My name as I remember it is Robert […]

Cindy Kelly: I am Cindy Kelly with the Atomic Heritage Foundation and it is June 26, 2013 and we are in Rio Verde, Arizona and my first question is please tell us your name and spell it. Tom Scolman: I am Thomas Scolman, although officially I am Theodore T. Scolman, S-C-O-L-M-A-N, and I Was born October […]

Kelly: This is Cindy Kelly, and I am in Boulder, Colorado. It is June 25, 2013, and I am going to be interviewing Bert Mills Tolbert. And the first question for Bert is to say his name, and then spell it? Tolbert: My name is Bert Mills Tolbert, spelled T-O-L-B-E-R-T. Kelly: Why don’t you start […]

I was in the SED, the Special Engineer Detachment and I worked in what was then called D-Building and with my college James Gergen I purified all the plutonium that went in the Nagasaki bomb.  That’s what I did. The purification that we used was purely in the liquid phase. We worked with solutions of […]

Cindy Kelly: I am Cindy Kelly, the date is June 6, 2013, and we are here with Dr. Roy Glauber. And your first question is to tell me your name and spell it. Tough one, start with a tough one. Roy Glauber: I probably can even spell it! I am Roy Glauber and that is […]

Gladys Evans: I’m Gladys Ellen Wimberley Evans, G-L-A-D-Y-S E-L-L-E-N W-I-M-B-E-R-L-Y E-V-A-N-S.  Kelly: Terrific. Okay, now if you could start with telling us, you know, where you were born and raised and how you got to Oak Ridge. Evans: All right, well, I was raised in Sweetwater, Tennessee, which is about fifty miles from here, and […]

Cindy Kelly: Let’s start by having you tell us your name and spelling it. Irene LaViolette: I’m Irene LaViolette. Kelly: And how do you spell that? Can you spell your name? LaViolette: I-R-E-N-E; V middle initial, LaViolette, L-A-V-I-O-L-E-T-T-E.  Kelly: Great. Today’s date is February 13, 2013. My name is Cindy Kelly and we’re here at […]

Cindy Kelly: I am Cindy Kelly, and this is May 9, 2013 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We’re interviewing Lawrence Bartell. Dr. Bartell, can you please say your name and spell it? Lawrence Bartell: My name is Lawrence Sims Bartell, I am the son of Lawrence Sims Bartell, but I’m not “junior” or “the second” or […]

[At top is the edited version of the interview published by S. L. Sanger in Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford, Portland State University, 1995. For the full transcript that matches the audio of the interview, please scroll down.] Book Version: The first day of September, ’44, in a nice howling dust […]

W.K. MacCready: One of the challenging things we had, when we started up the separations plant and were running a reasonably complex chemical process, was that we were not able to inform our operators of the identity of any of the chemicals that they used, including the additives that they pumped out of the storage […]