The Uranium People 0844813001, 0684162423

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Uranium People Leona Marshall Libby

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Say _ The bean story of the Manhattan Project by the woman ~ who was the youngest member of the original scientific team

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The Uranium People

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THE

Uranium

People Leona Marshall Libby

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Crane Russak - New York

Charles Scribner’s Sons:New York

The Uranium People Published in the United States by

Crane, Russak & Company, Inc. Charles Scribner’s Sons Copyright © 1979, Crane, Russak & Company, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Libby, LM The uranium people. Includes index. 1. Atomic energy— United States—History. Ty Pitle: QC773.3.U5L52 —621.48'0973 = 79-1463 ISBN 0-8448-1300-1 (Crane Russak) ISBN 0-684-16242-3 (Scribners) No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. 1357911

13151719

I/C

2018 161412108642

Printed in the United States of America

Photo Acknowledgments Argonne National Laboratory: 1, 9, 11, 12, 15,

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9) 15, 1On aC) 245 23,524,228, .20, 30534540

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory: 10, 13, 14,

26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 43, 47, 48, 51, 52 Los Alamos Photographic Laboratory: 33, 35,

36, 49 Lawrence Radiation Laboratory: 8 The New York Times: 38 Battelle-Northwest: 39

Publifoto: 40 National Archives, U.S.A.: 42

United Press International: 50 All other photographs courtesy of the author Endpapers courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Hyde Park, New York

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Chapter 4 Prt caro he ee eeen Petia ee Siege 118 Chapter 5 Martie reat Forests.

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Chapter 9 From Los Alamos to the Pacific AGRIAC STO. CAVETIMOLE 1.50 ao nk 0 Pala fees. ot nee 288

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Introduction ©), December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor

and sank most

of it,

work on my doctoral thesis was already well along toward completion at the University of Chicago. The previous year, I had participated in a seminar conducted by Nobel laureate James Franck; my doctoral work was carried on in the University of Chicago physics department, whose chairman was Nobel laureate Arthur Compton; and my doctoral professor was future Nobel laureate Robert Mulliken. These three scientists joined the Metallurgical Laboratory when it was established at Columbia University almost immediately after Pearl Harbor to conduct the U.S. uranium and plutonium project. The Metallurgical Laboratory moved from Columbia University where it had been initiated to the University of Chicago in the early spring of 1942, bringing with it Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and his colleagues Leo Szilard, Walter Zinn, Herbert

Anderson, John Marshall,

Albert Wat-

tenberg, and several other experimental physicists who participated in the establishment of the first chain reaction, as well as

future Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner and other theoreticians such as Edward Teller and John Wheeler. When I joined the Metallurgical Laboratory in August 1942, the original group from Columbia University had been already much enlarged. Included among the newcomers were chemists from the University of California at Berkeley led by future Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg and his group, engineers, doctors, and metallurgists, and frequent visitors such as future 1X

Introduction

Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, Nobel laureate Ernest Lawrence

and his group of cyclotron experts, and theoreticians from Berkeley led by Robert Oppenheimer. In the years that followed I visited, consulted, and worked

at the laboratories where the uranium—plutonium project developed—at the University of Chicago and the Argonne Laboratory outside Chicago, at the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington State, at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and

at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. Over the years during which I worked with the scientists who populate the pages of this book, I found them to be very human beings as well as splendid scientists. In this book I have tried to tell not only what was scientifically interesting about the uranium-plutonium project but what was human and interesting about the people involved. The book originated in notes for a course oflectures on the early years of the development of atomic energy, given in January, February, and March in the Bicentennial Year, 1976, at the University of Utah. Laura Fermi, who kindly was going to read it before its publication, died suddenly December 26, 1977.

Chapter 1

Laura and Enrico Fermi P..... the most influential person in my life was Enrico Fermi, not only scientifically but also philosophically. He set the example of how best to deal with other people, how to anticipate change, how to put up with the ambient indignities and humiliations of the world, and how to cope with the inevitable spiritual charges of taxes and death. He managed this instruction without pomposity. As he frequently said, he was amazed when he thought how modest he was. Others didn’t share his amazement. Clearly he knew the extent to which he excelled in mental ability, and often said that to think people are born equal was idiocy, that they differed by orders of magnitude in ability. Although I didn’t believe him then, I do now.

Laura rounded

Fermi shoulders

described

Enrico

as

short-legged,

and neck craned forward,

with

black hair and

dark complexion, narrow nose, and gray-blue eyes close together. By the time I met him, most of his hair was gone. We worked together frequently, and on theoretical problems when ideas ran out, he used to clean his nails as a means of refreshing his thoughts. If fragments of his lunch hamburger got caught in the gap between his front teeth; he would pull a few hairs from the slim fringe at the back of his head and use them as dental floss to remove the bits of meat. When he was younger, he used to smile for his photographs, and one can see the space between his front teeth; in his last photos, however, he was conscious

that the gap was amusing and so he kept his lips tightly shut when the shutter clicked.

The Uranium People

Although Enrico was only about 5 feet 6 inches tall, he had a strong powerful body. For many years, Sam Allison, professor of physics at the University of Chicago, affectionately referred to him as “‘my boss, that sawed-off little wop.”” Laura and Enrico told Herb Anderson and me stories about their vacations in the Dolomite Mountains in northern Italy where,

when they registered at resort hotels, they would be told that the famed Enrico Fermi was being expected as an honored guest. He was, at first glance, unrecognized by the hotel managers despite his fame, probably because of his regular features and shortness. After Fermi’s arrival at the University of Chicago with the Manhattan District (the name given to the nuclear energy project), lasked Herbert Anderson when I would meet Fermi. He replied that I already had, at noon that very day, standing among a group of physicists at the front of the physics building. I didn’t overlook him again. It was because Herbert Anderson and Enrico were already firm friends, as close as brothers, and because Herb and I were

becoming friends, that I got to know Enrico and Laura Fermi. During the summer that the Manhattan District at Columbia was moving to Chicago and I was completing my doctoral work,

Herb,

Enrico,

and

I went

swimming

in frigid Lake

Michigan every afternoon after five o'clock, off the huge breakwater rocks at the 55th Street promontory. Then we ate supper together at the International House, after which Herb and I walked back to the physics building—I to continue writing my doctoral thesis and Herb to disappear behind the already guarded, barred-off east part of the basement. To

get acquainted,

I took

Enrico

to one

of the annual

exhibits at the Art Institute of Chicago that I regularly enjoyed, and that I thought he might enjoy too, even though he had little interest in art. The exhibit, “From Colony to Nation,”’ consisted of American Portraits painted before 1776. Being an immigrant, Fermi identified himself with them because most of Zz

Laura and Enrico Fermi

them were immigrants, and he went around measuring against his thumb

held at arm’s length, the way

length of the bodies and the length of rule, he computed the ratio of body notebook, he plotted the ratios against having those ratios. The distribution

an artist does, the

the legs. With his slide to legs. In his pocket the number of portraits formed a respectable

Gaussian curve, the center of which agreed with the ratio of his

own body length to his leg length. He concluded that immigrants had short legs. Later, when his son Giulio grew to over 6 feet, he was surprised, puzzled, and pleased; he claimed that Giulio’s height was proof that Italian immigrants were likely to be short, not because of genetics, but because of poor food. He could remember that the food in his own childhood had not had much variety, and Herb, who was little taller than Enrico,

could remember even being hungry. In her book Atoms in the Family,1 Laura describes Herb as being of medium height, dressed with the elegance of the young bachelor fond of clothes. His chestnut hair was well trimmed,

his features were small and quiet, and his manners

unobtrusive. But he looked to me somewhat different. Almost all the graduate students and postdoctoral scientists during the 1930s and early 1940s had worked while they went to school. They had been poor kids and had earned their livelihood and tuition while gaining their undergraduate and graduate degrees, as had Herb also. The remarkable aspect of these young scientists was that, like their revered professors, they always wore suits and ties and had neatly trimmed hair—quite a contrast from today’s young Ph.D.’s who wear boots, jeans, work shirts, cowboy ties, and long hair. I don’t want to contradict Laura’s idea of the young bachelor fond of clothes, but Herb,

like most freshly graduated Ph.D.’s was too poor to be dressed. He wore the same Harris tweed suit day after unpressed, with a clean white shirt and the same tie, moccasin street shoes. It was a practical inconspicuous 3

well day, and cos-

The Uranium People

tume, a good outfit for hard work. All the young scientists I knew wore unpressed suits, but nevertheless suits, day after day, with clean white shirts and with neckties. How different from today’s daily costume parties in and out of the classroom and on the campus quadrangles, with students attired in droopy tops and bottoms no smart person would wear. The Fermis had arrived in New York as refugees from Mussolini’s Italy and had settled across the Hudson from Columbia University where Fermi had been awarded a professorship. However, the United States soon after was at war with Germany and Italy, and the atomic bomb project of the United States, called the Manhattan District, was initiated, first at Co-

lumbia and then secondarily at the University of Chicago. As a result, Fermi, who was the central figure in the atomic bomb

project, had to make the second move, this time to Chicago. When he first arrived in Chicago, Fermi stayed in an apartment around the block from the International House where I was staying. Laura and the children were still in their house in Leonia, New Jersey, arranging to move to Chicago. One evening, Enrico gave a party, inviting Edward and Mitzi Teller, Helen

and Robert

Mulliken

(my research

professor),

and Herb Anderson, John Marshall, and me. A popular game at the time was “Murder,” in which everyone drew straws to determine the murderer. The lights were suddenly turned out during a cotillion march and then someone was “murdered.” Next, the lights were turned on and there was an inquiry to determine the murderer. The second the lights went out on this particular evening, I shrank into a corner and listened with astonishment to these brilliant, accomplished, famous sophisticated people shrieking and poking and kissing each other in the dark like little kids. The youngest of all, I was 22 years old and

fairly shy. A few months later when I had an incipient acquaintance with Enrico, we discussed personality characteristics such as shyness. Enrico maintained that all nice people are shy, that 4

Laura and Enrico Fermi

shyness continues all one’s life, and that of course he had always been dominated by shyness. When I began graduate research in 1940, Professor Robert Mulliken’s group of graduate students and postdoctoral physicists working in the basement of the physics building was a remarkable accumulation of practitioners of the golden age of molecular physics. Quite suddenly, most of these young people were hired by Harold Urey and Willard Libby at the Manhattan District at Columbia University for the diffusion project to work on the separation of two isotopes of uranium— uranium-235 and uranium-238. In the previous year, there had been several seminars at the University of Chicago on fission of uranium and on methods of separation ofisotopes (atoms ofthe same element but having different

masses,

for

example,

carbon-12,

carbon-13,

and

carbon-14, or uranium-234, urahium-235, and uranium-238). These topics had now become classified against publication in the journals; yet seminars continued, with decreasing information content, and there was still some communication among the graduate students. So, the grapevine continued to keep me informed, with severe limitations, in that now and then I heard

bare scraps of information—for example, that my former colleagues were working with fluorine chemistry, which is basic in separation of uranium isotopes. Consequently, when Enrico Fermi asked me one day what I thought the Manhattan District was doing, I answered that it was making a uranium bomb. He didn’t mention the subject again until after I had joined the project and was cleared for secret information. Yes, it was making a uranium bomb. When the Fermi-Anderson-Szilard-Zinn branch of the Manhattan District moved to Chicago, the newly appointed director, Nobel Prize winner Arthur Compton, had a big, gracious house, and because he was also a dean, he had the influence that enabled him to obtain offices, laboratories, and

5

The Uranium People

machine shops in the University. Herbert Anderson and John Marshall moved into Betty Compton’s third floor, and Betty often had Herb, John, and me for coffee, ever thoughtful as she was to students and new post doctorals. John complained that Herb spattered toothpaste on the bathroom mirror when he brushed his teeth; Herb fell in love with John’s beautiful sister,

Delia; and Herb and John got along very well. John Marshall Jr. who had recently completed doctoral work, was of medium height and very handsome, despite the fact that his several brothers and sisters used to comment how sad it was that he was so ugly. He has a beautiful baritone voice that he still keeps in practice. His father John Marshall was the director

of the Du

Pont

Fabrics

and

Finishes

Department,

which invented Duco and Dulux, the remarkably tough coatings that were used for many years on General Motors automobiles and General Electric refrigerators. John had worked with Tom Johnson at the Bartol Foundation in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania,

on design, construction,

and execution

of the

early cosmic ray experiments, and this experience had made him into a nuclear physicist. His grandfather, far removed, had been the Supreme Court Justice John Marshall; on this account, Herb Anderson called him John Marshall, xvu. I married John IN 1943. At Betty’s cotfees, she always reminded us that she and Arthur thought so highly of their guests that she served them her own personal coffee ration (as soon as the United States was in the war, coffee was tightly rationed). These declarations made us uncomfortable, and we usually limited ourselves to a single cup each, but we got even. At that time, my mother was tending several apple trees in her garden outside Chicago. When harvest time came in the fall of 1942 Herb and John went there to help pick apples and were paid with a bushel ofthe best to take back to Betty Compton as 6

Laura and Enrico Fermi

a reward for her kindness; and with another bushel for Herb

and John. This was one of the first of our Sunday trips to the forest and farm country outside the city, and these soon became regular events, with Enrico and sometimes Laura accompany-

ing us. In the late summer and early fall we had already begun to swim together everyday in Lake Michigan from five to six o'clock in the evening, and we resumed when the ice melted in late spring; Enrico was sanguine about cold water but Laura declined,

after

she moved

her household

from Leonia, New

Jersey.

In September 1942 Laura Fermi brought the children, Nella and Giulio, to a big rented house on University Avenue and enrolled them in the University Laboratory School. Giulio was in a Leatherstocking stage, blazing trees along University Avenue on his way to and from school to help him find his way home. Nella early turned toward graphics and painting, probably under the influence of a spectacular art teacher who was then residing at the Laboratory School. Creating and teaching art became Nella’s vocation. Giulio has become one of the world’s acknowledged experts on application of mathematics to genetics in Cambridge, England. Our

five o’clock

swims

continued,

and, with

amazing

generosity, Laura cooked and fed us supper after supper. Herb complained that he was used to heated plates, whereas Laura’s plates were always cold. Laura meekly heated them after that. Giulio cried when we ate eggplant, saying that he wanted it all for himself. Herb said he would cry too if he didn’t get some. Laura cooked more next time. We had good conversations; Laura and Enrico told us about their life in Italy. Their chance to leave the Fascist regime came with the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Fermi in 1938. As they prepared for the week-long trip to Stockholm, they found that their children would be designated illegitimate on

The Uranium People

their passports because the children had not been baptized in the Catholic Church and because Enrico and Laura had not been married in the church. So, they arranged a second marriage,

this

time

in the church,

and

obtained

unblemished

passports. This humiliating problem reinforced Enrico’s determination to take his family out of the peril of the Mussolini government, which had announced severe restrictions against Jews only a few months before. His wife, being Jewish, was put in mortal peril. Although she didn’t realize it, Enrico did. They went shopping for watches, for a fur coat for Laura, and for leggings, helmets, and warm coats for the children—all of which made suitable and logical equipment for a midwinter trip to Sweden. They locked the apartment and got on the train. There was some delay at the border, but their apprehensions that the passport check might fail at the last minute were not fulfilled and they crossed without trouble. Their best memory of the Nobel prize award ceremony was that Enrico had to back away from royalty to reach his chair and almost sat in Pearl Buck’s lap. Enrico had accepted an appointment to the faculty at Columbia University; I asked him why the other members of his research group in Rome didn’t leave Italy also. He looked at me in surprise and said it wasn’t all that easy to arrange a job in the United States at a moment’s notice. Indeed, it wasn’t, especially then at the end of the Depression. It’s hard enough now. Their refugee syndrome continued to endure after the trip across the Atlantic by boat. With the Nobel prize money, Enrico bought a house in Leonia, New Jersey, across the George Washington Bridge from Columbia University. With great secrecy, they dug a hole in the basement floor by night and buried part of their remaining money as a precaution against the chance that money might be taken away from Italian enemy aliens, as they were now classified, and against other unforeseeable developments in the New World. Laura says they buried 8

Laura and Enrico Fermi

paper money. She should know, but I remember Enrico saying it was gold, and burying gold is more romantic. During the Korean War, when relations with Russia and China looked very black and the Russians already had detonated a deliverable hydrogen bomb, Fermi did a somewhat similar thing—he laid in a store of canned goods and water in his basement. At that time, about 1952, it seemed a slightly more unusual thing to do than would be the case today. The Fermis wrote to their relatives in Rome asking them to pack the furniture. It all arrived, including the garbage, which had been packed, too. This seems fitting; they used to laugh about the fact that if you left your garbage outside the door in Rome, it would be stolen.

Laura felt that Rome was the most civilized city in the world. That surprised Herb and me. We thought New York, Chicago, and San Francisco were civilized. Her entire life had been in Rome, was there still, and she had left it reluctantly. It is

fairly clear that her premature death would have occurred there, too, if Enrico had not brought her away, because, shortly after that, her father disappeared into a concentration camp and was never heard from again. Admiral Capon, Jewish in some sense of the word, had been an admiral in the Italian Navy; it

was unthinkable for the Nazis to have abducted and murdered him, but they did. Laura says she had closed her eyes to the evidence. Fascism had united with Nazism, and Italy became more or less a province of Germany. The German occupation of Italy resulted in tragedy for the Italian Jews. Some fled to hide in the Italian mountains, and some crossed the Alps on foot to the relative security of the Swiss concentration camps. They were guided by smugglers who knew the unguarded mountain passes and who helped carry bundles and babies; little children who could

stand on their feet had to walk. Some ofthese refugees changed their names and lived in disguise and fear. The old, who had felt 9

The Uranium People

protected by their age, and had refused to leave, were rounded up by the Germans and deported to labor camps and gas chambers; Laura’s father was one of them.

Among those Amaldi, a member Jew, he was on the churches, sleeping

who lived in disguise and fear was Eduardo of Fermi’s research group. Although not a wanted list. He hid out for many months in between the pews. He had many compan-

ions in the churches, other scientist refugees, who were wanted

because they refused to adhere to the dictates of the Nazis. Eduardo, today, could double for the most staid and respectable banker in all Europe, for the father of the “‘snake,’” for the determiner

of tomorrow’s

arbitrage. He is a calm, collected,

deliberate person, with fair complexion and blue or blue-gray eyes, and his wartime experiences made him mature early. Herbert, brought up with no father, a Depression child, also grew up rather elderly from his earliest years, worried from day to day how he would gain an education and pay for it and make a living, and become a good scientist as well. Laura says that Herb had a firm conviction that men are created equal, and indeed the sense of egalitarianism is deeply ingrained in U.S. children. The Fermi children were quick to catch on and came home with sermons about the United States being a free country. Enrico picked up and adopted such phrases as his own to prove that he was ready to become an American citizen. Whereas Laura and Enrico had identified themselves with the intellectual elite in their formative years in Rome, their children strove to become part of the American populace and tried to disassociate themselves from Italian ways and language and also to persuade their parents of the values of democracy. Nevertheless, Laura and Enrico shared with Herb and me and

Johnny their memories of Italy and their values derived from European civilization. $

IO

Laura and Enrico Fermi

Enrico and Laura discussed the Abyssinian War. Laura was for it; she thought Italy deserved to have colonies just as did the other European countries. Enrico thought it an insanity. Herb and I thought it criminal. They discussed the Americans—why did young Americans believe that everyone should have an education? Herb and I were indignant that anyone could ask such a selfish question. They said we were reacting like all young Americans. They asked us why America was so rich. We said it was because it was colonized by northern Europeans, who seemingly are able to work harder than southern Europeans. Laura and Enrico said anyone could see that it was because America had lots of free land. They scoffed at the idealism with which we adhered to the American standard of living. The very concept of the American standard made both of them quite cross and derisive ofits value to the human race. They found many American concepts in daily use unacceptable; for example, Enrico flew into a rage at the very idea of rating tasks in terms of number of man-hours. Enrico and Laura’s style was brutally frank. For example, Laura said Herb was a splendid driver, but he was always driving on the wrong side of the street. She said that Americans were barbarous; they rubbed their stomachs after dinner and remarked how full they were. She had seen an American Nobel Prize winner do this at a dinner given by the king of Belgium. She said that Americans talked about how they had to go to the bathroom, whereas a European would quietly fade away for the purpose. Enrico told how Laura refused to go to a doctor during her first pregnancy and how the baby died because of a breech presentation. Laura retorted that millions of babies are born every year without medical attention and that she had behaved logically. She was still cross with Enrico for outvoting her on storm windows for their Rome apartment, causing her to freeze for the winter, because he had miscalculated the JRA

The Uranium People

heat loss with and without the second window. She was an engineering major, and she should have made her own calculations to check up on him, I thought. Once, when I did something she thoroughly disapproved of, she said I ought to be whipped. It was a funny mental vision, that tiny fragile creature cracking a horsewhip over me. Laura told how Enrico had weighed their wedding presents under water to determine their density and so find out if they were really made of gold or silver. He did the same with his Nobel Prize medal, proving that it was fairly pure gold. Enrico told us that in winter, when he was a boy, he always had chilblains on his fingers. This story became reality for me when I spent one Christmas vacation working in the library of the physics building at the University of Rome. There were snow and ice on the streets, yet the windows of the library stayed wide open, because with no central heat at all, it was

colder

inside! The Fermis taught Herb and me how to talk with Italian cats, saying “‘tsk, tsk, tsk.” I tried that kind of talk successfully

with the cats roaming in the ruins in the center of the city when I was in Rome. Enrico seemed to like cats. He made friends with the machine shop cat at Columbia University. He and Herb worked evenings and weekends, and sometimes they needed some piece of equipment built in a hurry and would have to do so themselves because the machinist was not there. Fermi was learning how to use the lathe, bandsaw,

and mill,

something that every U.S. physics graduate student learned then as part ofhis or her training; but in Italy, where machinists worked for small wages, physicists did not have this training. Instead, machinists and technicians did the work of welding, machining, blowing glass, and so forth. In time, Fermi became expert in a rough and ready way, but in his first days, he had an accident and cut off the tip of his finger. After he tied up the wound and stopped the bleeding, he looked at the cut-off tip 12

Laura and Enrico Fermi

and, not to waste it, offered it to the cat. The cat, knowing it

was a piece of his friend, refused to eat it no matter how hard Fermi coaxed him and how persuasively he talked cat language. Years later, Fermi was still stirred by the memory of the waste of his own valuable fingertip, which the cat would not eat. We heard about Fermi’s first car. When he had been appointed as a very young professor and suddenly had become affluent,

he bought

a Peugeot

and roamed

the countryside,

driving around with his students and shouting, ‘‘Mussolini ha sempre raggione.”’ Another motto that he occasionally used was, ‘‘Ladro del govierno, piove.”’ The first was the motto of Mussolini’s administration, ‘““Mussolini is always right,” and the second indicated the regard with which that administration was rewarded—to be considered as always a thief, so that if even it rained, the government was accused ofstealing the good weather. This joke is not uniquely Italian. The New York Times Magazine once contained an article entitled “‘Letter From Athens,”

in which

a featured

quote was,

“If it rains in this

country, it’s the CIA’s fault.” Fermi was the youngest professor ever appointed at the University of Rome. The president of Italy, in making the appointment, was supposed to say at the ceremony, “In the name of the king of Italy and emperor of Ethiopia, I appoint you professor of physics,’ but he became rattled and, in the name of the king of Italy, he appointed Fermi the emperor of Ethiopia. Fermi liked that immensely.

Laura and Enrico pointed out that a major difference between Americans and Italians was that Italians were insulted if you called them stupid, but didn’t mind it a bit if you said they were dirty. In contrast, Americans got mad if you called them dirty but felt they couldn’t help it if they were stupid. Enrico explained his theory of why Jews were so strongly represented in the arts and sciences. He said the distribution of intelligence among the Jews was probably the same as in any r3

The Uranium People

other group of people, but if the least intelligent were always being killed, then those that remained had higher average intelligence. If left alone, according to him, the Jews would regenerate in their children the same distribution ofintelligence as in any other group. This theory may not be popular with Jews, even if it originated from a great man such as Enrico Ferm. Enrico described himself as a man of moderation, intolerant of any sort of excess. We teased him, asking if he would be intolerant of an excess of moderation (an old joke from philosophy). Another time, he maintained that he was a very tolerant sort of man. I reminded him that he was intolerant of homosexuals, as he had told us shortly before. He said, “‘It is so,

Leona, that you have always to argue.” Sometimes he was just plain wrong in a computation or an idea, and we would argue with him, showing that he was wrong. Then he would reverse his position and say, “‘It is just as I was telling you...” and explain the new position, our position, without blushing. He said that almost all of classical philosophy was useless. Also, he believed that poetry had gone out of fashion. Music was abhorrent to him unless it was a single tone, preferably going up and down at regular intervals, like a fire whistle. The house that the Fermis rented in Chicago had a piano, apparently the first that Fermi had come

close to, and there were

some

books of music to go with it. So, he had me teach him how to read music. Barely had he gotten the idea when he immediately invented a way of writing music in which the time axis, instead of going sideways from left to right, went down toward the keyboard like the roll of music on a player piano. He was astonished and lamented the fact that people had been writing music sideways for several centuries. Almost immediately, he lost interest in writing and, playing music and never mentioned the subject again.

14

Laura and Enrico Fermi

Edward Teller has said that Enrico was as tone deaf “‘as a block buster.’ But this was not true. Instead, it would seem

that music was something Enrico didn’t need for his happiness, and hence he paid no attention to it. My evidence is that one day, on a hike to somewhere, he began to sing an Italian hiking song. I, who had had a primitive high school course in writing music, pulled out my little black book and wrote it down as we

walked along, asking him to sing it over and over phrase by phrase, until I wrote it down right. Something about “‘in the far mountains,” and so on. John Marshall learned it immediately, committed it to memory, and sang it along with Enrico. Years later, I heard the song on the radio, and Enrico had it exactly right. He had been called “Little Match”? when he was a small child because of his violent temper. I saw this temper flash in his eyes the first ttme when he told me about it. Then his anger was directed against his parents. He said they treated him like a child when it had been clear to him since about age 3 or so that he was much smarter than they. Although Laura says that I overinterpreted the anger he seemed to show when he talked about the way his parents treated him, it was impressive to me. The second time, his anger was against me. I had just found out how he had voted on the issue of the hydrogen bomb when he was a member of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. I rushed into his office and asked how he, standing as he always had for knowledge, could have voted against finding out whether the hydrogen bomb would work. He flared up, shouting who did I think I was and so on for a good 20 minutes, leaving us both shaking and speechless. We talked again about this issue only when he was dying, and then with a great deal more understanding for each other. Another example of his capacity for violent anger was a stored-up, never forgotten bitterness against the physicists he 15

The Uranium People

encountered on his first visit to Germany as a very young man in 1923. He most of all resented the fact that Marie Curie and Werner Heisenberg, in particular, had completely ignored him, to the point of exceeding rudeness. Another time, after he had attended a faculty meeting of the Institute for Nuclear Studies, he came away in a towering rage because everyone had voted against him. As we drove to the Argonne Laboratory, a drive of about an hour, he stayed furious most of the way, emanating heat waves of rage. He had a deep cynicism that revealed itself in his infrequent comment that any political or administrative change is bound to be for the worse. He remarked to me that to be an administrator (in this case, a university dean), one had to be tall and handsome. We worked over the list of incumbents at the University of Chicago and showed that this was true. But, in his opinion, tallness and handsomeness usually were inversely proportional to intelligence. He excepted Arthur Compton (a very

handsome

man),

however,

whose

intelligence

he re-

spected enormously. But mostly he turned away from what displeased him, at least if he couldn’t change it, and thought of other things. He accepted unpleasant situations with a sweet reasonableness. This made him a comfortable companion. His enormous intelligence and quiet wit provided deep amusement. He introduced us to many games that, judging from Laura Fermi’s book Atoms in the Family, he had played also with his students and colleagues in Rome in some variant or other. One game used information in the world almanac. The object was to estimate each statistic in the almanac within a factor of ten. What is the number of sheep in Nevada? How many barbers are there in the United States? Give the area of Afghanistan. Surprisingly enough, in top-of-the-head estimates one rarely errs by more than the factor of ten. / 16

Laura and Enrico Fermi

One Sunday evening, Enrico suggested we calibrate the Fahrenheit thermometer. Every thermometer has to be calibrated, whether it is a gas thermometer, a mercury thermometer, a thermocouple, a bimetallic strip, or something else. Fahrenheit, who had been asked by the British Royal Society, to

make an official Royal Thermometer, chose as the cold bath that mixture

of ice, salt, and water

that is as cold as it can

possibly be made. Enrico and I kept tossing into our calibration bath more ice, more salt, more ice, more salt, without weigh-

ing anything, and we never did get the mercury to reach zero on the Fahrenheit scale. The variation of temperature is very steep for variations of this mixture; Fahrenheit had made a poor choice, and on this account, the early thermometers were

badly calibrated—rather, one should say miscalibrated. We have already mentioned Fermi’s comments on his modesty. He referred to his theoretical inventions—namely, the

Fermi

electron

gas,

the Fermi-Dirac

statistics,

and

the

Thomas-Fermi model of atoms—as “‘my gas,” “‘my statistics,” “my atom,’ with quiet, deserved pride. The statistical approach is a main theme running through many of his theoretical works over the years. We see it again in his computation of pion production in high-energy collisions, and in his betadecay theory, which combines the statistics of phase space with his guessed-at interaction energy, which has order of magnitude of only about one. Enrico’s favorite nonscientific reading, except for the newspaper, seemed to be the Reader’s Digest, especially the articles on general science. He read an article on turbines and jet engines that fascinated him so that he talked about them for days. He read another article on microwave heating, after which he wanted to see the hardware. So we looked in the Yellow Pages for a shop that sold microwave ovens, and we paid it a visit. He couldn’t figure out anything very amusing to a

The Uranium People

do with it just then; otherwise, he probably would have bought one for the laboratory. He reread Jules Verne at the end of the war and computed how to propel a voyage to the moon in the Verne style, using a deep hole for the guidance (like a howitzer), with a nuclear bomb in it to provide the explosive force to propel the spacecraft. It would have worked, too; in fact, he told about

it at lunch one day, and it may have provided the stimulus for a scheme of propelling a spaceship by shooting off small bombs against an explosion shield attached to one side of the ship. For years, that scheme was funded by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and worked on by the General Atomic Corporation. Fermi had a conviction that people with high foreheads were,

in general, smarter

on the average.

One

day, Willard

Libby, who had a high forehead, having tidied up the uncertainties in his method of radiocarbon dating, gave a seminar to tell all about it. He had been working out the method quietly for years, so quietly that except for Libby and his students, no one else knew about it. Libby’s talk was enormously impressive. Afterward, when Enrico and I were driving to the Argonne, he said that people with high foreheads like Libby’s tended to be very smart—didn’t I agree? I looked at him for a while

and remarked

that he, Enrico,

had a very high fore-

head—didn’t he agree? He had the grace to blush slightly, for it was exactly what he had in mind. He did not pay so much attention to every seminar. After a seminar on measurement of the magnetic moment of tritium by microwave technique in a strong magnetic field, I asked him to explain a point I had missed. He said he had not been listening—and probably he hadn’t, for, he was a compulsive lecturer and teacher, and secondarily a listener. But first and foremost he was a physicist, day and night, with his slide rule at 18

Laura and Enrico Fermi

the ready in his breast pocket and his mind relating ideas to numbers. If someone knocked on his door during the hours I worked with him, he would open the door a small crack with his foot against it, as if guarding against a break-in, and close it again after the shortest possible conversation. As we worked together,

I wrote down the numbers and he ran the slide rule,

or I interpolated by intuition and he wrote down the numbers, saying “‘Faster, faster.’ I had learned to interpolate rapidly as a by-product of my doctoral research in spectroscopy. At that time, there were only primitive computers. Enrico usually used his slide rule, but he had bought a small, handcranked computer with his own money. As fast as government funds began to enable the nuclear project to go forward, and as fast as better computers became available, he bought and mastered their functions. For the most part, we were integrating complicated mathematical expressions related to ongoing experiments, because he said it was quicker to integrate numerically than to search through integral tables for the answer. I usually had an office somewhere near his. He worked alone until he had figured out the theory, then called together his colleagues and explained his ideas, and then he and I made the calculations. One

day, when John’s

father, John Marshall,

Sr., was

dying ofcancer, Enrico found me sitting at my desk in a terribly dreary state. ““He’s only 55,’ I said. “It’s so lonely, dying.” Enrico pointed out that when you thought of how many people were dying at the same time all over the world, it wasn’t lonely at all. If this thought occurred to him as he lay dying a couple of years later; it wasn’t much consolation. When Enrico himself was dying, he raged about the doctors telling him that he would have time to write a book. He had some time left, but during that time he felt terribly sick, ip)

The Uranium People

plagued by uncontrollable wretching. We had written several papers together. We talked about writing another paper by E. Fermi and L. Marshall, and he, dabbling in black humor,

specified that in the publication after his name there be a black cross directing the reader to a footnote that would say, ““Care of

St. Peter.” He received many visitors who came to say goodbye to him in those brief weeks during which he lay dying, but he did so somewhat reluctantly because he said people looked at him as though his bones were showing. Eugene Wigner was one of his visitors. Wigner later shared a Nobel Prize with Maria Mayer and Hans Jensen, for the development of the theory of heavy nuclei. Eugene remembers the meeting vividly: “On a heroic scale was his acceptance of death. He faced it squarely and was able to joke about it with his most intimate colleagues a couple of weeks before his passing. The writer of these lines visited him ten days before he died. He was so completely composed that it appeared superhuman. ‘I hope it won’t last long anymore.’’’? It did not. Murray Gell-Mann and C. N. Yang went to see Fermi while he was still in Billings Hospital. Yang tells of their visit as follows: ‘“‘As we entered his room, he was reading a book which

was

a collection

of stories

about

men

who,

by their

willpower, had succeeded in overcoming fantastic natural obstacles and misfortune. He was very thin, but only a little sad.

He told us very calmly about his condition. The doctors had said that in a few days he may go home, but he would not have more than two months to live. He then showed us the notebook by his bedside, and said that it was his own notes on nuclear physics. He planned, when he left the hospital, in the two months’ time left, to revise it for publication. Gell-Mann and I were so overcome by his simple determination and his devotion to physics that we were afraid for a few moments to look into his face. (Fermi died within three weeks of our visit.)’’3 20

Laura and Enrico Fermi

In those last weeks at home, Enrico gave a deathbed speech to his children every night just in case it would be his last night. He received visits from Catholic priests (even though he had not been a very faithful churchgoer during his life) because he said that religion was good insurance. He spoke of his approaching death as a great experience, but he asked wistfully if |thought there was anything valid in the idea of afterlife. He was really cross about dying. I came out after each visit and drove home with tears streaming down my face. As he aged, he began to need glasses for reading, and so he bought several pairs with various degrees of magnification at the dime store, keeping them in his desk and choosing them as needed. He considered it stupid to spend money on prescription glasses. About then, something happened that made him think he was aging rapidly. His dentist discovered that several of his molars were dead and had to be removed. Probably related to the teeth was the next episode, a detached retina. This happened while Fermi was visiting Princeton; and a local doctor told him that, with care, his eye would recover. Enrico followed the rate of his eye’s recovery by counting the ridges on his fingertips while listening to the weekly seminars. Perhaps these symptoms prepared him to some extent for the onset of his last sickness, which took the form of increasing indigestion. He treated himself with pills for acid indigestion but began to lose weight and energy while he was lecturing in the Alps at Les Houches. When he returned, he was very thin and said he was afraid he was very sick. His doctors at Billings Hospital at first told him his sickness was psychological, and so he began to read the Merck Manual and other medical books in an attempt to diagnose his own illness. For several days he kept saying he was either going crazy or else what ailed him was very serious indeed. Next, the doctors made an examination of his esophagus by putting an endotracheal tube down his throat, but the visible 21

The Uranium People

tissues seemed to look normal. This was a horrible ordeal, and Fermi seemed to lose courage after it was over. Besides, he was

getting even thinner and was obviously losing strength. Finally, there was an exploratory operation that took many hours. I waited in his hospital room for Laura to come back from a discussion with the doctors only to read the tragic news written on her face when she returned. The cancer was widespread. There was no hope of cure. His daughter Nella phoned, and we had to tell her the worst. After he recuperated enough to leave the hospital, Laura rented a hospital bed for the house. Enrico told her to rent it only until the end of November because he wouldn’t need it after that—and he didn’t. He had calibrated his life to the day of death. Death came from a heart attack on November 29, 1954. During November, Fermi had several conversations with Dr. Robert Hasterlik of Billings Hospital on the possible benefits of pituitary irradiation, a technique that was being developed by Dr. John Lawrence of the Universityof California at Berkeley, using the proton beam of Ernest Lawrence’s cyclotron. However, they together concluded that the exhausting effort involved in flying Fermi there, making the irradiation, and flying back, when weighed against the likelihood of extending his life by the irradiation, balanced to zero or was perhaps even negative. He computed it negative and declined. Fermi had wanted to leave Italy for the United States years before the award of the Nobel prize gave him a reason for a graceful exit. In his words, he ‘“‘had some difficulties in Italy and will always be grateful to Columbia University for having offered to me a position in the Department of Physics at a most opportune moment.” But Laura rebelled against leaving her home, her friends and relatives, her memories, and her gracious

way of life. To her, Rome was the most desirable residence in all the world, ‘“‘Caput orbis terrarum” (“the head of the world’’), the Eternal City, the most wonderful, and the Italians 22

Laura and Enrico Fermi

the most educated, sophisticated people in all the world. Herb and I had much to think about in that concept, for we had not dreamed that any place could equal the United States, and we thought that the features worth having, wealth of opportunity and wealth of technology, were mainly in the United States. Laura had been raised as a child ofprivilege in a household of servants. After arriving in New York, she learned to cook

from an Italian maid she had brought book to the maid and watching what Laura, she was cooking with ease in ple, she used prepared biscuit mix to

with her, reading a cookshe did. By the time I met her own style. For exammake pizzas. Her dinners

were the classical Italian menu—soup,

pasta, meat, and fruit,

but she took shortcuts with frozen and dried input materials. She talked in her version of the English language of one toast and two toasts, but got even with me by instructing me that “macaroni” is plural. She snapped off the prickly tips of artichokes by hand (I never do that—does anyone else?). She read in her grandmother’s cookbook that thin bread was vulgar. I said that my grandmother had told me that thick bread was vulgar. When I helped her with dinner, she told me to go lightly on buttering the bread because everyone was too fat already. She said that half the world worried about not enough to eat and the other half about eating too much. In her Los Alamos days, at Thanksgiving, the Army canteen had a big supply of fresh turkeys. She had never cooked a fowl before, but Emilio Segré told her how to do it and made a list of the internal organs that should be removed before the roasting should begin; but he didn’t tell her how to get them out. So there she was, after buying the bird, faced with the problem of how to

open it up. Resourcefully she solved it and checked out the parts, one after another—gizzard, lungs, liver, heart, and so on. For reasons that now seem inexplicable, Laura had been a

student of general science at the University of Rome and secondarily had followed a course of electricity for engineers. But 4)

The Uranium People

it seems that she shed any pretensions ofinterest in the sciences as soon as possible, namely, directly after passing the 2-year physics examination. In the first dozen years I knew her, she never asked a question about the physical world, never showed the least curiosity about the Manhattan District nor about its subsidiary, the Metallurgical Project. Furthermore, she was not remotely interested in politics nor the war. Her life was fulfilled by her children,

home,

women

friends,

clothes,

food,

and

domesticity. She blames herself now that she didn’t know anything that was going on in the Metallurgical Project, until, after the war, Enrico handed her the Smythe report (Atomic Energy for Military Purposes)* and suggested she might like to read it. In an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, she wrote about her stay at Los Alamos saying that she found herself enjoying her first vacation from physics since marriage. In fact, she was already vacationing when she came to Chicago. She says she avoided any questions that might lead to scientific explanations. She wrote that on their honeymoon in the Alps, Enrico resolved to teach her physics. He declared that he was a good teacher and that he believed he could teach physics to anyone, no matter how stupid. Enrico seems to have started the course with the theory of electromagnetism, with the Maxwell equations, and Laura seems to have started with a monumental resis-

tance to his teaching. When he said something was obvious, she retorted that it wasn’t obvious to her; when he said he had proved something, she refused to agree that it was proved. She called in her close sister, Paola, as a referee, and Paola

always seems to have agreed that Enrico had proved nothing. Laura says of this time that she had placed her husband on a pedestal and physics seems to have been on a pedestal also. They started to write a book together and she recalls that Enrico produced six pages per day if he worked alone, and four if

24

Laura and Enrico Fermi

Laura helped him. And within a year or so he stopped discussing physics with her completely, which she seemed not to mind. I looked through Laura’s books for clues to her idea and ideal of awoman. In her book Mussolini, she wrote about Anna Kuliscioff,

a girlfriend

of Mussolini’s,

as

follows:

“In

her

youth, she had everything a woman may wish, beauty, wealth, great intelligence, and as great a heart.’’5 This may delineate what Laura conceived for her own role in life. She already had enormous beauty, a fair amount of wealth, and an intelligence oriented toward the humanities. It is puzzling why she had enrolled in science and engineering in Rome. Of herself, Laura wrote that she had been educated to be an accomplished lady, but she had received what Enrico called an unreal education. She had neglected all the practical side oflife: ““Our maids did the housework, my mother selected our clothes, my parents took care of school tuition and books. I let my mother buy our furniture. I acquired no feeling for money and how to spend Bes In Laura’s writings, there is the following bit of philosophy: “Such 1s the difference between man and woman that only woman likes to keep her hold on what she has grasped, like an oyster does on a rock, or a shoot of ivy on a fence.’’ This suggests that she is a firm believer in a double standard of behavior for men and women. It is hard for me to understand how she filled her time then and even after she came to Chicago. Her children were at school most of the day, and she certainly didn’t cook all day. She didn’t concern herself with politics, economics, or science

at that time. What did she do, I wondered.

In the lady, Laura knew that English by

process of preparing to be an accomplished young had learned English and was very proud of it. She she spoke better than Enrico. He had learned his reading Jack London. Reading gives one a vocabu25

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lary of the moment but does not teach pronunciation. Laura’s English classes gave her a better pronunciation than Enrico, and

she made the most of this by correcting his pronunciation. They deserved each other in many ways; she took a back seat to no one, and argued with him invincibly on any subject that she felt belonged to her domain. For example she started a book club among her university and Manhattan District friends. Enrico and I happened in on one of the meetings, and he made a suggestion on how to operate an exchange ofbooks. She flared up immediately, saying, ‘““You run your physics as you want, but this is my club and I will run it as I want.” And she did. The fact that she did not want to talk about physical problems ‘nor listen to them explained to her caused a set of conversational “‘rules” to gradually be evolved in their domestic life, excluding discussions of daily laboratory developments, happenings and results, and new publications in the literature, unless something truly exceptional occurred. For example, when news of the discovery of fission by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner arrived in New York, Enrico tried

to explain it to Laura. She relates, ““He does not like to talk shop at home except when extraordinary events grant a breach in the rules, and the recent discovery well deserved a breach in the rules. iam a slow thinker and lack the necessary background to grasp scientific matters easily.”’ She asked him whatever had become of element 93, and he replied that it was, in reality, a

mixture of radioactive fission fragments. She had remembered the talk of element 93 among the students in Rome which arose because one of the results of Fermi’s research in Rome was a report of a complicated radioactivity caused by absorption of neutrons

in the heaviest,

naturally existing element,

uranium. Fermi suggested that this radioactivity perhaps was evidence for formation of anew element (63) that was heavier than uranium, which is element 92. Then, thought Laura, fis26

Laura and Enrico Fermi

sion is the death warrant for element 93. But further discussion was now at an end by the Enrico was already deeply involved in computing the chain reaction, now become a possibility by

she saw that rules because the theory of the discovery

offission, with its concomitant emission of extra neutrons, and

was not listening to her anymore. When he was working on a theoretical

problem,

she reports, he withdrew

to his office;

when at home, he appeared totally absorbed, taking little notice of his family. When he was working mainly on an experimental problem, he withdrew to the laboratory. It seemed

to me,

too,

that he was

totally devoted

to

physics. As early as six or seven in the morning, he was in his office, preparing a lecture, writing on the blackboard, or preparing the numbers needed for the day’s experiment or for a committee meeting. Later, he was with Herb and John and me in the laboratory working all afternoon and evening. He seemed to tire around nine o’clock, and so he would go home and the rest of us would continue until three or four in the morning, depending on whether we could complete a measurement by then. Laura says that Enrico waited bravely for the established time to go to bed and was at work at the earliest dawn. Laura’s great beauty gave her the seductive and striking qualities of a movie star. Photographs taken when she was a teenager, and later newly married, show it. When I first met her

in 1942, I thought her the most beautiful lady I had ever met. | was in great awe of her, of her intelligence and her beauty. She was intelligent but not interested in science, and so when we talked, it was about her cooking, her children, her real linen

sheets. (I had never seen linen sheets; I slept on the third floor of her house on her linen sheets and told her that if they were mine, I would put them on the dinner table—she replied that she already had linen tablecloths.) We also talked about books, mostly novels of the year, what was the best olive oil, and the

a7

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like. I had not realized, for example, that olive oil is produced in subsequent pressings, each sequentially less desirable because it is more bitter. I admired her deeply, but I never expressed my feelings because of shyness. Other people were well aware of her beauty. Today she has it still, her skin glowing with a delicate rosiness. Once Enrico asked me if I thought his daughter Nella was beautiful. To me the Fermi children were like cherubs on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—with rounded faces, large dark eyes, and dimpled, luminescent, rosy skins. I said I thought Nella was a living Renaissance cherub. Enrico caught his breath and told me I could have no idea how beautiful the teenage Laura was. Men were much beguiled with her beauty. After Enrico’s death, James Franck told me of his infatuation with her. I en-

couraged him to call her and become friends, but the time was not in phase because he died shortly after. James Franck was an addition to the chemistry department of the University of Chicago in 1938. He arrived at a point when the department had no professors of quantum mechanics. The department at that time was exceedingly strong in organic chemistry and was personified and led by the great chemist Morris Kharasch, who required that all students pass the same examinations in organic chemistry that were taken by the organic chemistry students. Considering the inadequacies of the instruction in modern quantum chemistry, that was perhaps the best thing that could have happened. Then Franck, a refugee from the ships of state sinking in Europe, settled at Chicago with splendidly deserved financial support from the John Ulric Nef Foundation. Franck, a Nobel prize winner in chemistry, was of the peripatetic school of thought. There are two kinds of thinkers: the first thinks out a theoretical position alone to the point of being able to defend it and measure and compute the proof; the second must walk’ about and talk out 28

Laura and Enrico Fermi

the problem with a sympathetic audience—the peripatetic—to arrive at group decisions. When I had passed the 3-day qualifying exams in chemistry, after which

I could begin research, I had a conversation

with one of my best friends, Theodore Puck, then a research student of James Franck. Puck is now a famous and much honored professor of medical biology at the Medical School of the University of Colorado in Denver. Ted’s research problem was on how the exceedingly complicated process of photosynthesis may begin to be understood. Ted, a city boy, had never looked at a leaf before. Every day, he went to the University of Chicago greenhouses across the street from the chemistry building and picked a hydrangea leaf for the day’s work. He showed me his leaf-of-the-day, asking if I had ever seen anything so beautiful. For me, hydrangea is more or less as beautiful as cabbage, but I saw the joy and love in his city-boy eyes and his total delight in his daily peripatetic sessions with Franck, developing ongoing new hypotheses about how photosynthesis takes place. After this conversation, I decided that Franck was an exciting person to work with on my doctoral research problems. The previous winter, Franck had held a research seminar that was unique in my previous experience in the chemistry department. All the students came to it, but no other professors attended. Nor did the other professors head similar seminars. Franck had assigned me to give a talk about the Brillouin theory of solids, a very new theory that had interesting systematics. Organic chemistry had almost no systematics at that time in 1939. I did the best I could, with almost no grounding in quantum chemistry; somehow, the talk turned out well. So, when I got up the courage to ask Franck if he would allow me to be his graduate student, carrying out research for the doctoral degree, he accepted me. But, he said, he must give me a