Scientific Discoveries

Jacob Beser:  The story which we could tell. And one point that Dr. Wittman, though, which I wish you would please keep in mind—and this is true not only in this situation, but any historical event  should be evaluated in the context in which it took place, the context and the times in which it […]

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 […]

John Healy: Hello. S. L. Sanger: Hello this is Mr. Sanger from Seattle, is this a good time to talk about Hanford, or no. Healy: Another one you may want to talk to is Carl Garmertsfelder in Knoxville. Sanger: In Knoxville, now what was his position? Oregonian said he was a radiation control manager. Healy: […]

Richard Baker: The first plutonium that, other than the cyclotron that produced plutonium, was made at what was called the Clinton Piles at old X10 down in Oak Ridge. The Chicago Met Lab worked on the micro scale reduction of the metal. This produced rather small quantities but never enough quantities to study its properties in […]

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: You remember this visit now? Norman Hilberry: Oh, boy. Groueff: Could you tell me about that part? Hilberry: This was one of the reasons why the pile got built under the West Stands. The Manhattan District had been building a building out in the Argonne Forrest out in the Park District to build […]

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 […]

Alfred Nier: By the summer of 1943, the question came up, what I should do next? And I had a chance to – [J. Robert] Oppenheimer had gotten a hold of me and suggested I might come out to Los Alamos. Stephane Groueff: And you knew him? Nier: I knew him, yes. I had met […]

Carson Mark: We shouldn’t have been making this damn bomb without trying to keep it secret from [Joseph] Stalin. We should’ve been talking to him like [Niels] Bohr said. [Klaus] Fuchs believed and took it into his own hands to make sure that the conversation went on. Of course, he didn’t need to because Stalin knew […]