A Different Time

Sarah’s brother gave me the most interesting book for Christmas. It is entitled The Manhattan Project and is composed of various outtakes from history books, primary sources and first hand accounts. It’s all arranged in a vaguely chronological order and is incredibly readable. I even find myself remarking to Sarah after each entry in absolute amazement. My present job is arguably lacking in innovation and creativity so it’s amazing to hear about this amazing development environment. In fact many things I do have been heavily documented and done by many people for many DECADES, so it’s crazy to hear about people thinking up stuff and racing about to make hardware. This is the environment I had always dreamed I’d be in and it’s ironic that it existed in its purest form while creating the first atomic weapon. Despite any moral objections you may have to the project’s ultimate goal the sheer scale and success of the whole thing is a good study in what people can achieve. The management of the whole effort is astounding but the people themselves I think were the reason for its ultimate success. Sure they were given lots of money and political backing but everyone in particular performed outstandingly. From what I can tell everyone was given a project or task they could not immediately see how to complete.. almost everything they did was a first. There is even one story of a woman who created only finely woven quartz bands and was one day asked to work on an a wartime project in an unknown location. She had no idea what she’d be doing or where but she took it and was asked to design and fabricate a micro-measurement scale. She was scared to death, had never even designed anything much less made jigs and used metal working equip … and she did it. They all did. They went from theory in 1938 to a reacting nuclear pile underneath Stagg Field at the U of Chicago in 1942. This reacting pile was created in one of the densest parts of the country and the only assurance that it wouldn’t detonate were the calculations by Fermi himself. To go from that primitive pile of uranium to a bomb in 1945 is beyond belief. This was only after incredible amounts of ambitious and revolutionary engineering on all known fronts… be it chemical, mechanical, electrical and nuclear.
I can’t help to think how exciting the whole thing must have been.. to have been galvanized for a purpose and to work with some of the greatest minds in the country. An article by Feynman talks about how they all worked so well together. It’s funny because you’d think egos and personalities would quickly fuss things up in a room literally full of Nobel laureates. That wasn’t the case, after lengthy discussions he says the entire room would often come to the same conclusions. Self managing groups.. amazing. I guess when you have an ultimate goal in mind, and everybody can “run with the pack” so to speak, great strides can be made.
The way the all talk about it, the labs were bristling with new ideas, revolutionary ideas and they were quickly implementing them… on the scale of DAYS. I wonder if we will see a time like that again, hopefully for a more inspiring purpose.