Manhattan Project Hyde Park HPHSweb.doc
27 April 2004 draft
This is the written version of a presentation to the Hyde Park Historical Society on April 25,
2004, adapted for the HPHS website.
HYDE PARK WOMEN IN THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
by
Caroline L. Herzenberg
1. Introduction
Today we’re going to examine an aspect of the history of Hyde Park that isn’t widely known.
You probably all know that during World War II, crucial work on the Manhattan Project was
conducted here in Hyde Park. I’m going to tell you about how women, and especially women
scientists, contributed to this work. You may be surprised to hear it, but there were a lot more
women who lived in Hyde Park and worked in the Manhattan Project than I can possibly tell you
about this afternoon, so this is just going to be some highlights.
We are going to breeze through a bunch of historic photos mostly from the time of World War II
back some 60 years ago. When I talk about the people involved in the Manhattan Project, I’d
like very much for those of you who knew some of them, please speak right up and tell us about
them, so we can all hear some personal recollections, and do some reminiscing.
2. The Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was the first very large scale science-based technological project, the first
"big science" endeavor, it was the crash program to develop the very first nuclear weapons.
The United States was of fighting in World War II then, and many American young men had
been drafted into the military forces and were fighting overseas. This led to serious personnel
shortages in the American workforce, and for the duration of the war many American women
went to work in traditional jobs and also in non-traditional jobs that women in this country had
never held before. The U.S. propaganda during World War II encouraged women to work - but
only within limits. "Rosie the Riveter" became a popular national image. Some of these
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working women of World War II were scientists and engineers and technicians in the Manhattan
Project. These women made some rather important contributions to the Manhattan Project, but
both because secrecy and also because of discriminatory attitudes at the time, the
accomplishments of these women scientists and even their activities and presence were largely
omitted from the official histories of the Manhattan Project, and it is only in recent years that
their work and their contributions to science and technology have been more widely recognized.
...
Before World War II and the Manhattan Project started, women scientists mainly in Europe
played leading roles in the study of radioactivity and early nuclear physics and nuclear
chemistry. There were 20 or so women chemists and physicists working very early on nuclear
energy; these included Marie Curie, Irene Joliot-Curie, and Lise Meitner. Lise Meitner had a
particularly significant role; she was involved in experiments and theoretical analysis that
established that the process of nuclear fission actually took place (that under some conditions,
heavy nuclei could break apart), and also she showed that at the atomic level, the energy that was
released in individual nuclear fission reactions was very much larger than the energy that was
released in individual chemical reactions.
The potential implications of this large release of energy in individual nuclear fission processes
was quickly recognized by scientists around the world, and there was speculation as to whether
nuclear energy could be released on a macroscopic scale, thus providing a new source of
enormous releases of energy. This was all happening while war was brewing in Europe. World
War II was declared in September of 1939, just 9 months after Lise Meitner and her colleagues
had discovered fission. National governments soon got interested in the possibility that a new
type of explosive of almost inconceivable power could be developed and weaponized. It was
considered a long-shot possibility, but several nations started supporting more research in this
area.
Before the U.S. entered World War II, some small-scale research relevant to the release of
nuclear energy was already going on at universities. The 2 principal centers of research were at
Columbia University in New York City, where there was research on nuclear fission, and at the
University of California in Berkeley, where the element plutonium was discovered and initial
investigation into its properties began. Women scientists worked at both of these locations. The
United States entered World War II in December 1941. Right after the U.S. entered World War
II, a decision was made to consolidate the university research relating to an atomic bomb, and
move it to a location near the center of the country. The University of Chicago was selected, and
this site was designated the Metallurgical Laboratory (or the 'Met Lab" for short); the name was
intended to disguise the nature of the research that was going on.
The Manhattan Project started officially in June of 1942 and ended in 1945. (The name
originated because the early work at Columbia University in New York had involved the
Manhattan Engineer District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), By mid-1942, it was
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clear that this was going to be an immense technological undertaking, and that a vast
array of laboratories, pilot plants, and manufacturing facilities would have to be
constructed; and that many scientists and engineers would have to be assembled to carry
out the mission. By the end of World War II, the Manhattan Project was located at three
major sites as well as individual laboratories at a number of universities. The three major
sites were, first, the Clinton Engineer Works (as the whole complex at Oak Ridge was
called then), which produced enriched uranium-235 by the gaseous diffusion method; and
second, the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington, which was the site on which were
built the large nuclear reactors (production reactors) and fuel purification plants used to
produce the radioactive fissile element plutonium; and finally the Los Alamos Laboratory
in New Mexico, which was charged with the engineering design of the nuclear weapons.
But some of the very important work started, and continued, at the Met Lab in Chicago.
And some of the women who worked at the Met Lab and lived in Hyde Park later worked
at the other major sites of the Manhattan Project also.
The first crucial issue in the Manhattan Project initially was to establish whether nuclear energy
could in fact be released in macroscopic amounts and not just in occasional isolated individual
nuclear reactions. Effectively, (1) it had to be determined whether a nuclear fission chain
reaction could be made to occur, in which nuclear fission in one nucleus would cause
neighboring nuclei to fission, and the fission of these nuclei would cause fission in still further
nuclei, and so on. That was the first goal, and it was tackled at the Met Lab in Chicago. If the
feasibility of nuclear fission chain reaction could be established, it would then be necessary (2) to
produce sufficiently large amounts of explosive fissionable materials and, finally, (3) to design
and construct a bomb. Women made significant contributions to all of these aspects of the
Manhattan Project.
...
First let’s take a quick look at some of the principal figures in the Manhattan Project. General
Leslie Groves was the military man placed in charge of the Manhattan Project. One of the bestknown scientists locally involved in the Manhattan Project was Enrico Fermi. This slide shows a
of a photo taken toward the end of World War II of General Groves presenting Enrico Fermi
with an award for his work on the Manhattan Project. (Judging by the background, I think that
this ceremony may have taken place in the Oriental Institute here in Hyde Park. The other
scientists present include Sam Allison, who was my thesis director.)
The work of attempting to produce a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was
conducted by Enrico Fermi's group. Fermi's operation moved from Columbia University to the
University of Chicago, and it was at the Met Lab at the University of Chicago where the world's
first nuclear reactor was built and tested in 1942. First I want to remind you what the site of
those historic experiments looks like now – most everybody here will probably recognize the
sculpture by Henry Moore entitled “Nuclear Energy” that was erected at the location where the
first nuclear reactor had been built, which is just west of Regenstein Library, on Ellis Avenue
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between 56th and 57th Streets.
The first nuclear reactor was built by Fermi’s famous team, working under the stands of Stagg
field at the University of Chicago. Various other Met Lab activities, which included chemistry
and biology and other areas of science, were located in other buildings around and nearby the
campus.
Before the historic pile went critical, there were a number of subcritical assemblies built. (The
exponential piles and the earliest nuclear reactors were called piles because they were built up of
big stacks or piles of graphite and uranium blocks.) One of the women who worked on the
calculations associated with the piles was Kay Way. She analyzed data from the early atomic
piles to determine whether the neutron multiplication factor could be made large enough to
permit a self-sustaining chain reaction to occur. Subsequently, she became well known in
nuclear physics for her compilations of nuclear data, the Nuclear Data Tables.
And here is a picture of an artist’s sketch of CP-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor.
Physicist Leona Woods (later, Leona Woods Marshall Libby) participated in the work on CP-1
Leona Woods was a graduate student at the University of Chicago who completed her Ph.D. in
molecular spectroscopy shortly after going to work with Fermi's group, where she was drafted to
assist with construction of the boron trifluoride detectors used to monitor the flux of neutrons
from the piles. Use of the detectors, the instruments that Leona was building, was of great
importance in determining when the pile went critical. Here’s a slide of Fermi’s whole team,
taken later on campus on the 4th anniversary of the experiment. Leona Woods was present on
the memorable day (December 2, 1942) when the atomic pile under the stands at Stagg Field did
go critical, when it was operated to produce the first self-sustaining nuclear fission chain
reaction. No pictures were taken on the occasion of that great experiment, but an artist tried to
recreate a view of it. Afterwards the team celebrated the success of the experiment with a bottle
of wine - an Italian wine, chianti, was selected, since the group leader, Enrico Fermi, had come
to the United States from Italy. And after drinking the wine, they signed their names on the wine
bottle, and Leona's name appears on the the Chianti bottle which records the celebration of the
success of the atomic pile, the first controlled release of nuclear energy, the demonstration that
nuclear energy and nuclear weapons were indeed feasible. Subsequently, they prepared and
signed a listing of persons present at the CP-1 experiment. Here’s another slide of a subsequent
celebration of this historic experiment; this was a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the
event, you can see President John Kennedy presenting awards to the CP-1 team, - right in front
of Kennedy is Glenn Seaborg, who was in charge of plutonium chemistry at the Met Lab, and
you see Leona there too.
Following its initial operation, the first reactor was dismantled, moved off the University of
Chicago campus, and rebuilt at the Met Lab's Argonne Lab at Site A, in a more remote area of
the forest preserves outside of Chicago. Leona Woods, who had married physicist John Marshall
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in July 1943, continued working on the piles at Site A – here’s a slide of Chicago Pile 2 (called
CP-2). She continued to conduct experiments on the operation of the pile after she became
pregnant. Leona hid her pregnancy under overalls and a denim jacket and worked until two days
before the birth of her first son in 1944. Here’s another slide of John Marshall relaxing in a
rowboat with Enrico Fermi. Subsequently John Marshall was sent to Hanford, and Leona Woods
Marshall moved to Hanford to join her husband in overseeing the operation and construction of
the plutonium production reactors there. Fortunately her mother was willing and able to
accompany her to Hanford to help them with the childcare problem. For the remainder of the
war, Leona Marshall concentrated her efforts on the production of plutonium for the new
weapons.
Jane Hall was another physicist who worked at the Met Lab. Here is a photo of an historic
original listing of the staff of “Division of Argonne Laboratory” at Site A. It is hard to read the
names, but Enrico Fermi was Chief Physicist and Division Director, and you can see Jane H.
Hall is listed near the beginning. She and her husband, who was also a physicist, left the Met Lab
to go out to Hanford where she worked in reactor safety and health physics. Later, Jane Hall
went to Los Alamos, and she became associate director of Los Alamos. Jane Hall was one of the
very few women who moved into management positions during and just after the Manhattan
Project – the glass ceilings for women were even more impermeable in those days.
...
So the feasibility of the nuclear fission chain reaction was established at the Met Lab at the
University of Chicago. It was also necessary to produce the necessary amounts of fissile
materials, and to design the bombs. In May 1942 the decision was made to proceed
simultaneously on all promising production methods for fissile materials. Both the possibility of
building a nuclear bomb based on the fission of U235 and the possibility of building a nuclear
bomb based on fission of plutonium were pursued in parallel as parts of the Manhattan Project,
and women worked on both of these approaches.
...
At that time, plutonium had only recently been discovered and was then only available in
microscopic amounts. Plutonium had been discovered in California, but the plutonium project
work was transferred to the Met Lab in Chicago. Much of the important plutonium research of
the Manhattan Project took place at the Met Lab in Chicago in Glenn Seaborg's research
program, and there were many women doing plutonium chemistry and radiochemistry and
related work there. Here's one of the women chemistry technicians at the Met Lab on the
University of Chicago campus. Here's a slide of one of the women chemists, Nathalie Seifert
Baumbach; Glenn Seaborg invited her and her husband to come from California to work on the
plutonium project; she worked as a research assistant on the early microchemical studies of
plutonium. Here's one of the few women who was a senior chemist on the Manhattan Project,
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Hoylande Young Failey. Here is a transparency of some more of the many plutonium chemistry
staff at the Met Lab; including one of the few black women doing technical work on the
Manhattan Project - Mildred Summers}.
Here is a slide taken later of one of the women biologists who worked on the Manhattan Project
at the Met Lab, Miriam Finkel . (This photo was actually taken after the war when she worked
in the biology division at Argonne National Laboratory.) Radiobiology first came into
importance during the Manhattan Project, and there were other women involved in radiobiology
also – most of this work took place at Met Lab site B, which was located just south of the
Midway.
I’ve been emphasizing women in technical work, but all of the Manhattan Project benefited from
the contributions of many other working women besides the technical women. There were a
number of women who worked as secretaries; at the Met Lab for example Sonia Katz worked as
a secretary in chemistry and married her coworker Joe Katz, who was a chemist at the Met Lab –
they have been my neighbors in East Hyde Park.
...
Another line of research and development in the Manhattan Project was directed toward building
a nuclear bomb based on the fission of the fissionable uranium isotope U235. In order to be able
to build a bomb based on U235, it was necessary to produce large quantities of that isotope. U235,
the essential fissionable bomb component, could not be separated from the much more abundant
isotope of uranium, U238, by chemical means directly, so the atoms of these isotopes would have
to be separated by physical means. Up until that time, isotopic separation had generally only
been done for tiny amounts of matter. No one knew how to do that for large quantities of
material then; hence, different potential isotopic separation methods had to be developed and
analyzed and evaluated for their feasibility, and then engineering development and construction
took place.
One of the women who did some of the very early work on possible isotope separation methods
was the most famous and distinguished woman physicist involved with the Manhattan Project,
future Nobel laureate Maria Goeppert Mayer. Maria grew up in Germany, and lived and studied
physics in Gottingen, where she met and married Joe Mayer, an American who was also a
student there. After they completed their degrees, they moved to the United States. Maria ran
into the usual difficulties faced by women scientists in finding professional employment. A
theoretical physicist, she was teaching half-time at Sarah Lawrence College, when she joined the
isotope separation project at Columbia University in 1942. She became a senior member of a
research group on the project but was not given a full-time appointment. Her early work in the
Manhattan Project consisted of theoretical studies of the thermodynamic properties of uranium
hexafluoride gas which was used in the diffusion process for the separation of uranium isotopes.
She also conducted theoretical investigations of the possibility of using photochemical reactions
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for isotope separation. Later on, Maria Mayer's theoretical work focused on the energy emitted
by a nuclear explosion as electromagnetic radiation. She calculated the opacity of uranium and
called attention to the enormous energy released as electromagnetic radiation during a nuclear
fission explosion. When she did these calculations, her results were considered unimportant,
however the results later proved to be extraordinarily important for the eventual successful
design of the hydrogen bomb. After the war, Maria Mayer taught at the University of Chicago,
and also worked at Argonne National Laboratory, where there is a plaque in her honor on the
physics building. While she was at U of C and Argonne, Maria Mayer developed the theory of
nuclear structure known as the nuclear shell model, for which she was awarded a Nobel Prize in
physics. Maria and her husband Joe lived right here in the Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood, I
remember being invited to their house once when I was a graduate student – I was greatly
impressed by her extra-curricular talents for growing plants, including orchids.
Following the early feasibility studies of isotope separation methods, they had to be scaled up
and full-scale separation facilities built. Because facilities would be large and complex, and
because of the requirements for secrecy and large amounts of electricity, the isotope separation
facilities were built in what was then an isolated area of Tennessee near the TVA, near what is
now Oak Ridge. Quite a number of women worked in the Oak Ridge area during World War II,
many in non-technical work, and there also a number of women in technical work. Here is a
slide of women workers operating isotope separation equipment at Oak Ridge during the war.
Among the women who worked in the Oak Ridge area was Gertrud Nordheim , a German
educated theoretical physicist. She emigrated to the United States in the early 1930s with
her husband, Lothar Nordheim, who had been formerly a professor at Gottingen, and who
became the first Physics Division director at Oak Ridge. Gertrud Nordheim worked on
calculations of neutron diffusion in the reactors. But the Nordheims had minor but
annoying problems with military security: on their arrival at Oak Ridge, the guards
inspected their luggage, and found a bottle of whiskey that they had brought with them,
and the guards immediately confiscated their whiskey. And, later, Gertrud had another
run-in with security: one day on the long bus ride to the lab she got into a spirited
discussion with chemist Charles Coryell who was also on the bus (he was later at the
University of Chicago also), and she was talking to him about the element rhenium. The
guard on the bus thought that she said "uranium," and it was against the regulations even
to mention the word "uranium," so the guard reported her in to security, and she again got
into trouble with the authorities. Before long, both Nordheims decided that they had had
enough of Oak Ridge, and they came to live in Chicago and work at the Met Lab and
then later went to Los Alamos.
...
Back to the plutonium story. In order to build a bomb, large quantities of plutonium had to be
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manufactured. Since plutonium was not a naturally occurring element, it had to be made by
transmutation of another heavy element, uranium, by exposing uranium to neutrons, in a nuclear
reactor. So in order to manufacture the necessary amounts of plutonium, a number of large
nuclear reactors had to be built. Again, metropolitan Chicago was not an optimal location, and
the production reactors were built in an isolated area of the state of Washington, which became
the Hanford Engineering Works or Hanford Reservation.
Metallurgy was very important in the Manhattan Project, and especially at Hanford. There were
new and relatively unknown metals to deal with, particularly uranium and plutonium. And
because uranium metal is highly reactive toward water or air at elevated temperatures, a very
important requirement was to develop metals which could be used as protective cladding over
the uranium present in the reactors.
A woman scientist who worked primarily here in Hyde Park at the Met Lab made extremely
important contributions in this area to the reactor development at Hanford. Nathalie Michel
Goldowski had been born in Moscow in 1908 to parents who were part of the Russian
aristocracy, in 1917 she escaped from the Russian revolution with her mother and went to live in
Paris. She received a D.Sc. degree in physical chemistry from the University of Paris for
research on the corrosion of metals. She then went to work for the French Air Force where she
became chief of metallurgical development when she was only 32 years old.
When Hitler’s armies occupied France, Goldowski escaped to the United States where she joined
the Manhattan Project in Chicago in 1943. Her work in the Metallurgical Laboratory was in
corrosion chemistry and metallurgy, and was most important in the development of an aluminum
bonded coating for the uranium slugs used in the Hanford reactors. Uranium corroded too badly
to be exposed to cooling water; the uranium was canned in aluminum, but unfortunately
aluminum covers for the slugs also corroded badly. The canning of the aluminum slugs had
turned out to be one of the most noteworthy problems faced at Hanford. The new, non-corroding
aluminum coating for the uranium that Goldowski developed turned out to be critical to the
success of the plutonium production project. Goldowski has been described as a hot-shot
metallurgist, and her solving the problem of bonding the uranium slugs to the aluminum shells
for the Hanford reactors has been described as a most important contribution to the project, one
that "made it all work".
When the big plutonium production reactors at Hanford were first put into operation, a very
strange thing happened. The first plutonium production reactor in Hanford was turned on in
September 1944, and when the operators tried to bring up the power level, the reactor turned
itself off. (Imagine what a downer that must have been, - how discouraging!) So the possibility
of successful operation of the plutonium production reactors seemed doubtful, because the
nuclear chain reaction tended to cease when the reactor power levels were increased. Solving
this problem, which turned out to be caused by absorption of neutrons by one of the fission
products, took several months. The solution to this problem and the subsequent successful
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operation of the Hanford production reactors has been called one of the exciting
accomplishments of World War II. This effect was determined to result from the build-up of one
particular fission product, an isotope of xenon which absorbed the neutrons. Women physicists
played an important role in solving this problem of the so-called "poisoning" of the reactors.
These include the distinguished experimentalist Chien-Shiung Wu, later known for her very
important work on parity, - her expertise in the nuclear properties of noble gases enabled her to
help to solve the problem of the "poisoning" of the chain reaction in reactors from the buildup of
noble gas fission products with extremely high neutron absorption cross sections. (Chien-Shiung
also did some work on isotope separation early in the Manhattan Project.) Another well-known
physicist, Kay Way, whom I mentioned earlier in connection with her reactor calculations at the
Met Lab, also contributed to the solution of this reactor problem, as well as working on many
other aspects of the Manhattan Project, and she collaborated in developing the Way-Wigner
formula for fission product decay, and did theoretical work on reactor design which was used in
the production reactors at Hanford.
...
Before 1943, work on the design and functioning of the bombs themselves was very limited and
largely theoretical, established on basic experiments carried out at a number of different
laboratories. But in 1943, a new Manhattan Project site was set up on an isolated mesa at Los
Alamos New Mexico specifically for that mission, and many of the staff members from the Met
Lab transferred out to Los Alamos. The engineering design of the nuclear bombs and their
construction and preparation for field tests was conducted at Los Alamos.
There were many women at Los Alamos engaged in mathematical calculations and computations
and in doing experiments, and working on the design and construction of the nuclear weapons.
One of the women involved in performing these calculations was Mici Teller, whose husband,
Ed Teller, is sometimes referred to as the father of the hydrogen bomb. The Tellers spent some
time at the University of Chicago also. Another was mathematician Frances Wilson Kurath,
shown in this slide taken in New Mexico relaxing with her spouse, Dieter Kurath, who also
worked in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos before he came to the University of Chicago and
then to Argonne National Laboratory. Heres another of them together after they returned to the
University of Chicago.
At Los Alamos, women were involved in experimental work as well, as shown in the next slide
of a woman cyclotron operator at Los Alamos.
Here is a picture of one of the women chemists, Norma Gross; teamed up in moving some
intensely radioactive shielded radiolanthanum sources on a sledge. She was a member of the
Women's Army Corps, the WACs, and she arrived at Los Alamos in 1944. She played a critical
role in developing a method of assessing the progress of an implosion for detonating a plutonium
weapon. Radioactive lanthanum-140, which emitted gamma rays, was seeded into the metal
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core. As the explosion compressed the center of the system, the density of the system increased,
and fewer gamma rays could penetrate the imploding mass to reach the ionization chambers
placed around the test explosion. Norma Gross was involved in the separation of radioactive
lanthanum from barium-140, which was shipped to Los Alamos from a hot lab at Oak Ridge.
She and a colleague developed a new process for separating the lanthanum from the barium:
precipitation of lanthanum hydroxide. A great advantage of her new process was that it could be
carried out remotely and thus minimize radiation exposure of personnel.
The women of course didn’t spend all of their time working. Some of them became romantically
involved and married. Here’s a slide of Eleanor Ewing, who worked as a technician at Los
Alamos, getting married to a coworker at Los Alamos during World War II. The Manhattan
Project's scientists and engineers developed a number of test devices, including this enormous
object called "Jumbo" which was intended to contain a bomb test, but was never used. This
picture was taken at the Trinity test site, and that's Eleanor Ewing again, standing in front of
Jumbo at the Trinity test site in New Mexico.
Here’s another woman from Hyde Park who went on to work at Los Alamos. Elizabeth Riddle
Graves completed a PhD at the University of Chicago, as did her husband, Al Graves – they had
met and married while graduate students in physics. She had worked on neutron scattering
experiments during her thesis research, and when they got to Los Alamos, she began work on the
selection of a neutron reflector to surround the core of the ‘atomic bomb’. The neutron reflector
kept the neutrons inside the fissioning mass and speeded up the explosive growth of the chain
reaction.
Graves was seven months pregnant when the first nuclear weapon was about to be tested at the
Trinity Site, and she and her husband requested assignments away from the immediate location
of the weapon test. They were assigned to monitor radiation from airborne radioactive materials
that were expected to be blown away and drift away downwind from the test site. After figuring
out the probable meteorology for the time of the first nuclear test , they drove to the small town
of Carrizozo, New Mexico, which was 40 miles east of the test site, and they checked into a
motel there. They were loaded down with a bunch of gear, - a seismograph, a Geiger counter, a
short-wave radio, and a portable electric generator – I imagine that the proprietors of the tourist
court where they stayed must have been wondering what was going on. Diz Graves and her
husband Al had their short-wave radio on and listened excitedly to the countdown for the test,
but since they were so far away, it wasn’t until well after the explosion occurred that the
radioactive cloud arrived that afternoon. When the Geiger counter went off-scale, they radioed
the base camp, and the senior staff there discussed whether to evacuate the town, but decided
against an evacuation, and meanwhile the radioactive cloud had passed by the town in about an
hour.
That was the very first nuclear test explosion; it was codenamed "Trinity"; and when it
took place in New Mexico, the official observers seem to have been almost exclusively
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men. The women who had worked on the development of the bomb were either not
invited or had to be present elsewhere at the time of the Trinity test. Many of the Los
Alamos workers who had not been invited also wanted to see the first nuclear test
explosion, and they were ingenious and became remarkably well informed about it,
considering the strict security measures. From various bits of information known to
various technical and maintenance workers, the projected time and location of the first
nuclear test could be deduced. As a result, there were many unofficial observers who
gathered surreptitiously to watch the first nuclear test. Among them was Norma Gross, with her husband, an electronics specialist and Army officer who had been recruited by
chemist George Kistiakowski to work on electronic monitoring of weapons effects, she
drove to a wooded site with a view of ground zero and camped out through the long
night. She observed the Trinity explosion when it finally took place just at sunup.
One of the young women physicists at Los Alamos was Joan Hinton. She worked at the Water
Boiler reactor at Los Alamos. She was one of the group of graduate students and young
physicists who surrounded Enrico Fermi; - here’s a picture of Joan Hinton and her colleague
Robert Carter with Enrico Fermi, taken when they were on a picnic in the woods near Los
Alamos. Joan Hinton was another unofficial observer of the Trinity explosion. Joan Hinton and
the other graduate students in her group decided to ignore the restrictions and watch the bomb
being tested anyway. They knew when and where the Trinity test would take place, and they
sneaked in to observe it from a low hill about 25 miles from ground zero at Alamagordo.
Dodging the network of army guards in jeep patrols, Joan Hinton rode to the mound at sundown
on the back of a friend's motorcycle. They waited all night, as the detonation was delayed past
the midnight target hour because of thunderstorms. Then, just before dawn, they saw a
spectacular sight and saw an amazing light and felt the heat as the world's first nuclear explosion
went off. She wrote about it very evocatively.
I want to quote Hinton's own words to you, that she wrote to us: "It was like being at the bottom
of an ocean of light. We were bathed in it from all directions. The light withdrew into the bomb
as if the bomb sucked it up. Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up. We
were still talking in whispers when the cloud reached the level where it was struck by the rising
sunlight so it cleared out the natural clouds. We saw a cloud that was dark and red at the bottom
and daylight at the top. Then suddenly the sound reached us. It was very sharp and rumbled and
all the mountains were rumbling with it. We suddenly started talking out loud and felt exposed
to the whole world". Unquote. That was a quote from Joan Hinton, the young woman graduate
student who broke the rules and watched the world's first nuclear explosion. She subsequently
came to the University of Chicago for graduate study.
Within weeks after the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert, two of the project's bombs were
dropped in Japan by Air Force bombers. First a bomb based on the fission of U235 was dropped
on the city of Hiroshima, and then, a few days later, a bomb based on the fission of plutonium
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was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.
Shortly thereafter, World War II came to an end.
...
I don’t have time left to tell you about what happened to the women after the Manhattan Project
ended. Following the bombing of Japanese cities, Joan Hinton was shocked by the destructive
force of nuclear weapons and became very active in the movement to internationalize atomic
energy, and lobbied in Washington as part of the peace movement. Some women went on to
complete their degrees, some took university positions, or continued work in the national
laboratories. But some of the women dropped out of science. As men returned from the armed
forces and began looking for civilian jobs, the women found that their welcome into the labor
force was short-lived. The propaganda machine that at the beginning of the war had made war
work seem glamorous, was turned around at the end of the war to discourage women from jobs
and careers and push women out of the labor market and back into roles as housewives. So, after
the war, many of the women dropped out of scientific work.
...
But I think that you can see that there were many interesting and capable women involved in the
Manhattan Project. The roles of women in the scientific and technical work of the Manhattan
Project were almost as widely varied as those of their male colleagues, apart from the fact that
the majority of these women were employed as laboratory assistants or technicians, and very few
women were in senior technical positions or in decision-making positions, - then as today.
Women however were notably present, and they made very significant contributions to the
pioneering development of nuclear energy and to the creation of the first nuclear weapons in the
Manhattan Project. And so many of these women lived, and worked, and spent time in our own
Hyde Park neighborhood.
Thank you for your attention! Thanks for coming!
...
References
Howes, Ruth H. and Caroline L. Herzenberg. Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan
Project. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999 (hardbound) 2003 (paperback).
Herzenberg, Caroline L. and Ruth H. Howes, “Women of the Manhattan Project,” Technology
Review 96, No. 8, November/December 1993, pages 32-40.
Howes, R. H. and C. L. Herzenberg, “Women in Weapons Development: The Manhattan
Project,” Chapter 8 of Women and the Use of Military Force (eds. R. H. Howes and M. R.
12
Stevenson). Boulder, CO: Lynne Riener Publishers, 1993.
Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action – 1940-1972.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995.
Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Herzenberg, Caroline L. Website “Women of the Manhattan Project”
http://www.geocities.com/cherzenberg/Manhattan_Project_women.html
13
TABLE I
SOME WOMEN PHYSICISTS OF THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
Name
Site
Field/Activity
Elda Anderson
Mary Langs Argo
Joan Hinton Engst
Mary Rose Ford
Elizabeth Graves
Jane Hamilton Hall
Helen Jupnik
Margaret Ramsey Keck
Leona Woods Marshall
Maria Goeppert Mayer
Rose Mooney-Slater
Gertrud Nordheim
Edith Quimby
Jane Roberg
Elizabeth Rona
Lyda Speck
Leona Stewart
Katharine Way
Chien-Shiung Wu
Los Alamos/Oak Ridge
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Oak Ridge
Los Alamos
Met Lab/Hanford
Princeton
Los Alamos
Met Lab/Hanford
Columbia Univ./Los Alamos
Met Lab
Oak Ridge/Los Alamos
Columbia University
Los Alamos
Oak Ridge
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Met Lab/Oak Ridge
Columbia Univesity
fission measurements
nuclear fusion calcs
reactor design,const
health physics
neutron scattering
reactor supervisor
neutron absorption
explosives/medical physics
reactor design, detectors
opacity calcs
crystallography
neutron diffusion
medical physics
fusion weapon calcs
Po-210 initiator prep
neutron spectra
experimentalist
reactor design
xenon in reactors
14
TABLE II
SOME WOMEN CHEMISTS AND METALLURGISTS - MANHATTAN
PROJECT
Name
Site
Field/Activity
Myrtle Batchelder
Nathalie Baumbach
Yvette Berry
Ethaline Cortelyou
Marjorie Evans
Hoylande Young Failey
Rosellen B. Fortenberg
Margaret Foster
Kathleen Gavin
Nathalie M. Goldowski
Lottie Greiff
Susan C. Herrick
Lilli Hornig
Isabella L. Karle
Margaret Melhase
Mary L. Miller
Rose Mooney-Slater
Mary Nachtrieb
Mary Holiat Newman
Elaine L. Novey
Anne Perley
Ada Kirkley Perry
Elizabeth Rona
Roberta Shore
Marie Stuart
Juanita Wagner
Ellen C. Weaver
Met Lab/Los Alamos
Met Lab
Hanford
Met Lab
Met Lab
Met Lab
Oak Ridge
analytical chemistry
plutonium chemistry
prep & analysis
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
analytical chemistry
U and Th analysis
plutonium chemistry
fuel elt cladding
chemistry
uranium chemistry
Pu chem, explosives
transuranic chemistry
codiscoverer Cs137
supervised chem lab
crystallographer
Pu chemistry
U isotope separation
chemistry technician
biochem/radiation
anal. chem Y-12
Po-210 initiator prep
chemistry
radiochemistry
analytical chemistry
fission fragments
Met lab
Met Lab/Hanford
Columbia University
Columbia Univ/Oak Ridge
Los Alamos
Met Lab
Met Lab
Los Alamos
Met Lab
Los Alamos
Columbia Univ./Oak Ridge
Argonne
Los Alamos
Oak Ridge
Oak Ridge
Argonne/Oak Ridge
Oak Ridge
Oak Ridge
Oak Ridge
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TABLE III
SOME MANHATTAN PROJECT WOMEN IN THE BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES
Name
Site
Field/Activity
Elda Anderson
Elaine K. Bernstein
Emily Christian
Miriam Posner Finkel
Rose Frisch
Pearl Leach Gordon
Kay Hamilton
Gladys Morgan Happer
Roberta H. Jones
Gladys Lenoff
Marian E. Koshland
Margaret H. Nickson
Elizabeth Painter
Anne Perley
Edith H. Quimby
Mrs. Russell
Agnes Stroud
Los Alamos/Oak Ridge
Met Lab
Met Lab
Met Lab/Oak Ridge
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Met Lab
Oak Ridge
Los Alamos
Oak Ridge
Oak Ridge
Met Lab
Met Lab
Los Alamos
Columbia Univ./Oak Ridge
Oak Ridge
Met Lab/Los Alamos
biophysicist
biologist
biologist
radiobiologist
biologist
rad exposure nurse
biologist
physician
rad exposure nurse
rad exposure nurse
immunologist
physician
animal studies
biochem/rad exposure
medical physics
biologist
microbiologist
16
TABLE IV
SOME WOMEN MATHEMATICIANS AND COMPUTING STAFF
OF THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
Name
Site
Field/Activity
Jean Bacher
Bernice Brode
Lillian Carson
Joan Robertson Clark
Emma De le Vin
Eleanor Ewing Ehrlich
Josephine Elliott
Grace Estabrook
Mary Frankel
Naomi Livesay French
Hazel Genzel
Mildred G. Goldberger
Hazel Hudson
Betty Inglis
Margaret L. Johnson
Ann Kenney
Frances Wilson Kurath
Beatrice Langer
Kay Manley
Ardis Monk
Frances E. Noah
Arianna W. Rosenbluth
Angeline Sniegowski
Ethel Taylor
Augusta (Mici) Teller
Mrs. Uchimayada
Edith Wright
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Carbide Corp.
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Oak Ridge
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Princeton
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Met Lab
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
early sci assistant
computations Grp 5
in theoretical grp
math assistant
theo divn grp T-5
IBM calculations
theo divn grp T-5
statistician at Y-12
early sci assistant
theo divn grp T-6
Sept 1944
computations
Grp. 5, 1944-45
theo divn grp T-5
theo divn grp T-5
equations
th divn opacity calc
theo divn grp T-5
computations
computations
theo divn grp T-6
theo calculations
computations Sept 44
computations Sept 1944
theo divn, grp T-5
theoretical division
theo divn, grp T-5
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TABLE V
SOME WOMEN TECHNICIANS OF THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
Name
Site
Field/Activity
Gayle Adams
Yvette Berry
Pearline Boykin
Ann Cahn
Opaline Calhoun
Miriam White Campbell
Ruth Casler
Minnie Daniels
Jean Klein Dayton
Rebecca Bradford Divan
Frances Dunne
Grace M. Estabrook
Kay Florin
Beatrice Foreman
Rosellen B. Fortenberg
Olga Giacchetti
Rachel Gilbreath
Winifred Koziolek
Virginia Meshke
Betty Mokstad
Elaine Novey
Shirley Nyden
Helen Pellock
Ilsa Perlman
Ada Kirkley Perry
Marian Pinckard
Eleanor Eastin Pomerance
Mrs. Rubinovich
Selma Shupp
Lyda Speck
Mildred Summers
Helen Thomson
Virginia Towle
Evelyn S. Walker
Ellen Watts
Nancy F. Wood
Met Lab
Hanford
Met Lab
Los Alamos
Met Lab
Los Alamos
Met Lab
Met Lab
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Los Alamos
Oak Ridge
Met Lab
Met Lab
Oak Ridge
Met Lab
Met Lab
Met Lab
Met Lab
Met Lab
Met Lab
Met Lab
et Lab
Los Alamos
Oak Ridge
Met Lab
Berkeley/Oak Ridge
Met Lab
Met Lab
Los Alamos
Met Lab
Met Lab
Met Lab
Los Alamos
Met Lab
Met Lab
plutonium chemistry
analytical & sample prep
Pu chemistry - bl
laboratory technician
plutonium chemistry
bomb assembly plan drafting
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
H bomb detonator design
quartz fiber balances
explosives supervisor
Y-12 plant technician
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
analytical chemistry
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
laboratory technician
Y-12 analytical chemistry
plutonium chemistry
Y-12 and calutrons
detector assembly
plutonium chemistry
neutron spectra
Pu chemistry - bl
plutonium chemistry
plutonium chemistry
metal oxides, plastics
plutonium chemistry
detector design/assembly
18