The Birth of the Atomic Age:
The Manhattan Project in Chicago and its Effects on Science in the Surrounding Area

Enrico Fermi (font row, left) at the fourth anniversary reunion of the First Pile (reactor) expiriment

By Hannah Newfield-Plunkett

The words "birth of the atomic age" bring to mind images of screaming civilians on the streets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The child saved from a life with juvenile diabetes is rarely mentioned. Neither are the breakthroughs in discovering the fundamental structure of the universe. The laboratories that accomplished these feats, however, owe their existence to the United States'efforts to build an atomic bomb during World War II.

Before work on a bomb began, a nuclear chain reaction had to be achieved. Scientists including the great Enrico Fermi conducted this reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942. Thai chain reaction was vital in advancing the development of two world-famous scientific laboratories near Chicago: Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory which have made discoveries over the years that enhanced the progress of science worldwide and in Illinois.

The Story of CP-1

History was made on December 2nd, 1942, in the most unlikely of places: a doubles squash court under the stands at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. That's where Enrico Fermi's "pile," the first nuclear reactor, produced the first man-made chain reaction. In an age of fear for nuclear security, it seems strange that an event of such importance could take place in such an ignoble (and unprotected) location. A variety of factors determined the shape of that experiment conducted under such untraditional circumstances.

Before 1942, research on what would become the work of the Manhattan Project, the code for the scientists working to build an atomic bomb, took place all across the country, at universities including Columbia and the University of California. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, the United States joined the war, and it became imperative that research efforts combine for efficiency.

The government chose the University of Chicago as the site of the research because it was centrally located in the country and the project had support from UC's administration and faculty. This included Arthur Compton, head of the physics department at the university and a key scientist on the project. He decided Chicago would be the location to build the pile and used his connections to get the contract for the city.

By 1942, Arthur Holly Compton was already a famous physicist. He had studied X-rays extensively and won the Nobel Prize in 1927 for discovering a scattering effect of light affected by X-rays, which now bears his name. Compton had also proved the existence of the photon, a particle of light, before beginning work on the Manhattan Project. As such, he was a prestigious addition to the scientific team forming in Chicago.

Compton, however, was not in charge of the pile itself. That responsibility fell to Enrico Fermi, a pioneer in nuclear physics. Fermi won a Nobel Prize in 1938 for his research on nuclear reactions and radioactive elements resulting from them. An Italian, Fermi fled Mussolini and Fascism with his family at the time he received the prize, and became a professor at Columbia University in New York. His research made him a perfect candidate for the Manhattan Project. He was a leading force in the research at Chicago, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, was later named to honor him.

In May 1942, construction began on Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1), as the reactor was called. Scientists chose the original site to be well out of the center of Chicago. They knew that the pile carried a risk of melting down if they lost control of the chain reaction.

Compton stumbled upon the first suitable site while horseback riding with his wife, Betty, in Cook County Forest Preserve. A forested area named after the First World War battle of Argonne seemed appropriate for the construction of the atomic pile.

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The University of Chicago's Stagg Field was the site of the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

By October, however, problems arose with the Argonne site. Construction workers from the firm Stone and Webster who were readying the site went on strike, delaying the work indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the war intensified in Europe. Scientists in Illinois had no knowing of how far the Germans had come in their attempts to develop an atomic bomb, only that they had as much raw scientific talent in that area as did the United States. Because of this uncertainty, work on the U.S. atomic program could not be delayed.

Faced with equally unknown dangers—that of a nuclear meltdown in the heart of a city or that of a destructive attack the U.S. would not be ready to prevent— the scientists chose to risk the meltdown. Shortly afterwards, construction began on the pile in the squash courts under UC's Stagg Field.

The pile, built in a spherical shape for efficiency, eventually grew to 57 layers tall: the height needed to achieve "criticality' and begin a chain reaction. Scientists made the pile out of graphite with uranium balls inside. In theory, the nuclei of the uranium atoms would break apart when hit with neutrons, small neutral particles, and release more neutrons in the process. The graphite would then direct these neutrons to other uranium atoms to start the process again. At this height of 57 layers, enough neutrons would be directed into the uranium each time a uranium atom broke apart that the reaction would become self-sustaining.

Finally, on December 2, 1942, the scientists achieved their goal. Through the removal of the control rods designed to slow the chain reaction, the pile was brought closer and closer to a chain reaction until it finally became self-sustaining.

International effects

One of the greatest worries for scientists present on that fateful day was that the bomb they'd helped create would be used to kill civilians. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who had fled Germany in 1933 because of Adolf Hitler's rise to power and who later was a crucial scientist for the Manhattan Project, vehemently opposed the use of the atomic bomb. He once said, "If after this war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation." Other scientists echoed this sentiment, petitioning the government in 1945 not to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. Their petition was unsuccessful, however; even today, some scientists feel guilt over the horrors to which they contributed.

Argonne National Laboratory

At the same time the world reacted to nuclear powers and the budding nuclear age, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory were building on Fermi's reaction to develop "peacetime uses of atomic energy."

In 1946, when President Harry Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act transferring nuclear research to civilian control, he established Argonne as the first national laboratory. Walter H. Zinn, Argonne's first director, had worked four years earlier on CP-1, heading one of two round-the-clock construction crews that built the pile of graphite and uranium.

Under Zinn, Argonne turned its first focus to nuclear reactors. The first was CP-1, which scientists moved to Compton's original site as soon as time allowed. CP-1, renamed Chicago Pile 2 in its new location, functioned at the laboratory until the 1950s.

Argonne continued the legacy of nuclear progress Enrico Fermi had begun that December day under the stadium at the University of Chicago. On December 21, 1951, nearly nine years after the first nuclear chain reaction, Argonne researchers crossed a major bridge by using a nuclear reactor to light four lightbulbs—the first electricity generated by nuclear energy. Four years later, in 1955, the town of Arco, Idaho, close to a site affiliated with Argonne where many reactors were built, became the first community illuminated entirely by nuclear power. An Argonne reactor provided the power. Argonne also developed the first reactor for use on a nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus.

As years went on, Argonne scientists conducted experiments in particle physics. Their most successful particle accelerator, the Zero-Gradient Synchrotron (ZGS), was a premier particle physics laboratory until 1967, when it was overshadowed by the National Accelerator Laboratory, then being constructed close to Chicago.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

While the decision to build the National Accelerator Laboratory near! Chicago was not based on the proximity of the site to Argonne, connections! abounded between the laboratories, both during construction and after Fermilab was operational. Robert Wilson, first director of Fermilab, believed Fermilab's proximity to the Zero-Gradient Synchrotron accounted for much of its success in attracting physicists. When Argonne scientists, fearful of competition, threatened to shut clown the ZGS, Wilson protested worried the loss of the reactor would compel Argonne scientists to leave before Fermilab was completed. The ZGS remained open, however, and many particle physicists transferred to Fermilab, as Wilson had hoped.

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Even before construction began at rermilab, Argonne supported the efforts to build a new laboratory. In 1967, Argonne hosted the first users' meeting related to plans for the National Acceleratory Laboratory. Argonne scientists never feared for their jobs; they knew the high-energy experiments conducted at the new laboratory would Open new fields for them to study on their lower-energy machine.

Fermilab scientists, meanwhile, Continued the study of physics on the nomic and subatomic level that Fermi had started. Through collisions between accelerated particles in the largest particle accelerator in the world, they were able to study "quarks,' the basic building blocks of matter, which lid In their discovery of a new type of quark—the top quark— in 1994.

Likewise, research progressed at Argonne on biological fronts. One of their more recent achievements, the Advanced Photon Source (APS), built in 1995, creates an extremely powerful X-ray beam. This beam models extremely tiny objects, such as the cholera virus or the gene thought to cause juvenile diabetes, and could offer cures for these diseases in the future.

Research conducted at the APS also profoundly affected the world artistic community recently, when Argonne scientists discovered that composer Ludvvig Van Beethoven's chronic illness was caused by lead poisoning. APS researchers used samples of Beethoven's hair and compared lead levels in them to those in normal hair; Beethoven's locks were vastly higher than usual.

Similar scientific frontiers have been crossed at Chicago-area labs in the years since Fermi built his pile there. His chain reaction was a turning point in the history of World War II, and of warfare in general, but it also marked the beginning of modern science. In the more than 60 years since that fateful day, Illinois has been a major presence in the global science scene, mainly through the laboratories that grew out of his work there and still bear his name.

Hannah Newfield-Plunliett is a junior at St. Charles East High School in St. Charles, Illinois. Her strong interests in mathematics and physics are strengthened by the close proximity of Fermilab, whose presence is felt throughout the area.

For Further Reading

Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

National Laboratory, 1946-96. Urbanda: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Sachs, Rovert G., ed. The Nuclear Chain Reaction: Forty Years Later. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984.

Weart, Spencer R. and Gertrud Weiss Szilard, ed. Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1978.

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