In September 1954, Dick Hearn, an ambitious engineer with Ontario Hydro, Canada’s largest electricity utility, made his second trip to England. Ben Lewis, the key Canadian physicist, also came. Accompanying them, or rather ruling over them, were two more senior businessmen, namely Bill Bennett, the president of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, and Geoff Gaherty, head of Montreal Engineering. . .
Part of Argonne’s tribute to the first reactor, brought to life by Enrico Fermi on December 2, 1942, is a curio piece. It’s a two-and-a-half-minute Lego animation of that event, titled Chicago Pile-1: A Brick History, created by Brick 101, a firm that does Lego animations for a living. When I heard about it, I looked forward to a viewing, mostly to see what a 3D re-enactment reveals about the. . .
Alex Wellerstein is a consummate researcher with an eloquent writing style, so it’s no surprise that The New Yorker published his 75th-anniversary article on December 2. He really brings the first reactor to life but I especially enjoyed the twist at the end (my own more limited archival research didn’t pick up the evocative coda): After the war had ended and the world had come to appreciate the. . .
In my book I cover the rather arcane 1955 battle Walter Zinn, Director of Argonne National Laboratory, had with Midwestern universities over whether Argonne or the universities should build and operate an expensive accelerator. The following memorandum in the files shows one of Zinn’s men reporting back to him after attending an October meeting of the Midwest Universities Research. . .
Politician Stewart Udall (pictured) served as US Secretary of the Interior for eight years in the Sixties, and in the process became disillusioned with nuclear power. John von Neumann, an American (Hungarian-born) mathematician, physicist and computer science pioneer, had little to do with reactors but was a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1955 until his death in 1957. Here. . .
I’ve referred previously to the fascinating historical interplay between the two key British reactor pioneers, Nobel-Prize-winning physicist John Cockcroft and engineer Christopher Hinton. To put it plainly, they did not get along, though they both tried to make the relationship work, in different ways in different periods. The way they grated against each other is mostly airbrushed from. . .
49 people, some luminaries, some journeymen, one woman amongst them all, signed a celebratory Chianti bottle after witnessing Enrico Fermi and Walter Zinn’s Chicago Pile-1 “go critical” (that is, achieve fission), on December 2, 1942. The first one of anything is always special. I spend an entire chapter on CP-1 and this wintry Chicago morning, and am a fetishist on the event. . .
A while back, I quoted an interview snippet that encapsulated a strain of idealism in early nuclear power history. Far easier to spot in the historical record is the motivation of pioneering, of working in a brand new exciting field. I quoted Sellafield physicist Graham Brightman in that earlier post. Let me feature Brightman again: I moved over to work at the then very new shining Calder. . .
Last week I watched Ben-Gurion, Epilogue, a 70-minute documentary film exhuming a 1968 6-hour interview David Ben-Gurion gave to a British director and his film crew to inform into their script of a feature film on the legendary leader, a biopic recreating the man and parts of his life. The film reels came to be forgotten, almost lost. The accompanying soundtrack (which didn’t quite match the. . .
British atomic manufacturing supremo Christopher Hinton had a fearsome reputation that comes down to us more though asides and a handful of descriptions than from direct recollections. His diary is invaluable although generally cautious. But in this 1954 diary entry I catch him commenting on a non-executive director of the Atomic Energy Authority: There was a tough discussion about. . .