British physicist Terence Price had a way with words as well as numbers. In his autobiography, he recalls the start-up of what we would now call a minor research reactor, but was then significant. Bepo—British Experimental Pile 0—clicked into life on July 3, 1948. Price recalls his amazement that it
Sometimes it almost seems too easy to find idiosyncratic outbursts from Christopher Hinton, chief builder of early British reactors: Thank you very much for sending me the photographs of the charge machine which you have built for Calder Hall A. It looks very nice and I only hope that it
One of the aspects of British reactor pioneer Christopher Hinton that endears him to me is his ethical rigor. Here he is in 1955 writing to Harry Railing, joint managing director of General Electric Corporation (the UK version, unrelated to the American firm), one of the four companies selected to
Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Edgworth Morgan was controller for atomic energy during Britain’s crucial period of 1951 to 1953. In a private letter to his successor in mid-1955, we find out what Christopher Hinton thought of him: It is on the question of salaries that I seriously disagree. All of our
The Atomic Energy Authority in Great Britain briefed its directors in 1955, just before the grand International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva, on its “collaboration” with “third countries” (you can see that UK saw itself as number two globally, a conceit that in that period
Walter Zinn writes to his brilliant metallurgist, Frank Foote, in May 1955. To be honest, I’m not sure what his memorandum means, other than in generalities. What strikes me is the third sentence: “If the normal construction of the fuel element is used the thickness of the meat, which is
We don’t get too many international conferences these days with the expectations borne by the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, held in Geneva in August 1955. (Climate conferences are a modern comparable.) Jerome Lunz, the forthright editor of industry journal Nucleonics, expressed some of the bated
Christopher Hinton writes to two of his most senior managers in early 1955 that he has “read the report of the enquiry into the failure of the primary traps at Capenhurst and feel that much of the evidence is unsatisfactory.” I’m not sure what “primary traps” are, perhaps steam traps,
Nearly six months before the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, to be held in August 1955, Walter Zinn writes to his Division Directors – Scientific “to place in your hands all the information I have to this moment concerning the International Conference.” He sets out how
On February 10, 1955, John Cockcroft received a diplomatic letter attaching a translated Soviet article about that nation’s first “peaceful” (though it wasn’t) reactor at Obninsk (that location only got clarified later). Cockcroft handwrote to his technical guru, John Dunworth: “Do Reactor Physics have any views on this?” Dunworth’s handwritten