Manhattan Project infrastructure

Used to illustrate the eclipse of engineering credit by scientific credit. Tom notes Groves was an MIT civil engineer whose prior assignment was building the Pentagon; argues the Manhattan Project was as much engineering (building Oak Ridge, Los Alamos in weeks) as physics.

Let me read this paragraph from the beginning of this book on the making of NAE. "For almost two decades since the end of the war, the public perceived" — this is like early 1960s — "World War Two had been mostly a scientists' war. Although engineering achievements were vital in making the A-bomb possible, the credit went to Oppenheimer and his team of physicists." When you read about the A-bomb you don't really hear about the engineers. Does anyone know who was in charge? Oppenheimer was the scientific lead, but the person who had overall charge was an army general, an MIT grad. Groves. General Groves was an MIT civil engineer. His previous assignment, before being put in charge of the Manhattan Project, was to build the Pentagon. He did that in the late 1930s. Then he was put in charge of part of the Manhattan Project. Part of the Manhattan Project was basically to build all these cities in the middle of nowhere — Oak Ridge, Los Alamos. He had to build cities in weeks for all these people.

For example, there was a woman who came here from Oklahoma in the 1940s, and she became Morris Cohen's assistant. Morris Cohen was a very powerful professor running the physical metallurgy group in the '40s and '50s. He worked on the Manhattan Project, and virtually everybody who worked on the Manhattan Project for the next twenty to thirty years had automatic research from the Atomic Energy Commission and then the Department of Energy. You would just get renewed every two or three years, big grant, until you screwed it up. Most of them got screwed up. The last one was in the '70s. Dave Kingery and Bob Coble still got a big grant from the Department of Energy to do ceramics, but Cohen had lost his physical metallurgy one, John Chipman had lost his chemical metallurgy one. These were the gravy trains that helped keep the funding going and helped keep that powerful professor in power, as they controlled the money.

Post-WWII establishment of duplicate national labs (Livermore/Los Alamos, Bettis/Knolls) for redundancy and competition in nuclear weapons work.

Sandia in Albuquerque, New Mexico — let me back up. After World War II and the Manhattan Project, they wanted these things in duplicate, for safety. You see that in the navy nuclear program — there was Westinghouse Bettis and there was General Electric Knolls Atomic Power Labs for Admiral Rickover, submarines. That was competition. The government was paying twice to make sure that things were done right, and someone didn't have a monopoly. They had similar things — Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and Los Alamos Laboratory. Lawrence Livermore was out in California, run by the University of California. Los Alamos was also run by the University of California, so how may you be competing — but anyway, I'm sure they did, they were certainly competing for research funds.

The development of vacuum furnaces in MIT mechanical engineering during WWII is what made titanium (and uranium, tungsten, molybdenum, niobium) commercially available. Used to explain why titanium is "available to the world."

Does anybody know why titanium is available to the world? When it became available, why it became available? It really became available during World War II, and the reason was — I don't know if it was tied into the Manhattan Project but it probably was — here at MIT in the mechanical engineering department, people developed vacuum furnaces that could melt very high temperature metals that were previously almost unavailable. Titanium was one of them. I suspect uranium was one of them — a lot of people were working on uranium in both the materials department and other places at MIT during the Manhattan Project. Certainly tungsten, molybdenum, niobium.