THE DAY TOMORROW BEGAN

[Music] [Applause] we live in the Atomic Age born in wartime the atom has grown in peace to deliver unlimited power and unforeseen tools for medicine industry and research no one can say just when the Atomic Age began a long series of discoveries and experiments have made it possible each a step in the progression which has brought mankind greatest opportunities and problems this is the story of one memorable experiment and the scientists who were involved the persons you see in this film the voices you hear are real these are the people who opened the Atomic Age and this is one experiment the story of cp1 the day tomorrow began [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it is December 2 1942 the University of Chicago birthplace of the Atomic Age here behind the vine-covered walls of an almost abandoned football field the government has already begun work on the most important device in modern history never before and perhaps never again will a single effort so profoundly affect the future of mankind here in this unimpressive building are gathered part of the elite core of world scientists who are building the bomb from every part of the world they've come here at Princeton University he developed the first theory of fission and debated the possibility of making the bomb I particularly remember the room down the hall where he was telling us no the bomb will not be possible in principle you could separate uranium-235 and make a bomb but in fact to do it would take the whole energies of a complete nation of course he was only 2 right it took the efforts of three nations to build it at Columbia University Fermi was joined by another prominent physicist Leo Szilard brilliant and volatile zallard was almost the antithesis of Fermi he never lectured never kept the schedule a brilliant mind connected to a pair of hands that were never soiled in a laboratory as the atomic fraternity collected American scientists were made keenly aware of the German threat James Conant president of Harvard and Vannevar Bush president of the Carnegie Institution were already organizing government support for scientific research to the theoreticians at Princeton and Columbia universities were added the formidable talents of men like Arthur Compton chairman of the physics department at the University of Chicago and Ernest Lawrence director of the University of California radiation laboratory and inventor of the cyclotron here was an American breed of scientists experienced in the construction of impressive hardware conscious of world politics and determined to enlist government support by the end of nineteen thousand talking of the possibility of a chain reaction I enrico explained it to me and shortly after that they stopped talking about it they imposed secrecy on themselves and then I didn't hear anything before until my report the spaghetti a bomb a single bomb powerful enough to destroy most cities a bomb big enough to end the war with a single blow in natural uranium there is very little u-235 there is no way to make a bomb with natural uranium but if we make a big enough block of uranium so enough u-235 will be present it should be possible to start a chain reaction and for the first time release atomic energy convinced that Hien working under Lawrence had made a vital discovery using the cyclotron future Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seaborg produced a sub microscopic speck of an entirely new element plutonium from incredibly small samples it was possible to determine that here was a new man-made element which could substitute for u-235 the discovery made the Fermi salade experiment more important than ever if successful the chain reaction could produce plutonium in unlimited quantities furthermore u-235 was almost impossible to separate from natural uranium but plutonium could be separated chemically here was the ultimate material to make the bomb the sample that was isolated as a result of bombarding these hundreds of pounds of uranium with neutrons at Berkeley and st. Louis was finally isolated in pure enough form to weigh a few micrograms by a special balance in which a quartz fiber is suspended at one end and comes out with a weighing pen hanging from that end and then the sample put on that weighing pan depressed the quartz fiber and the amount that the quartz fiber went down could be calibrated to correspond to the weight of the sample and using that the first sample of plutonium was found to wait two point seven seven micrograms this was an absolutely fantastic idea not merely to make a bomb but to make it out of an element that had never existed before and a manufacturer this new element this idea of synthesis was a so preposterous that you could say how is anybody mad enough to think it could be carried through as it was so this is the problem make a chain reaction to make plutonium to make a bomb to end the war in Columbia in Princeton in Chicago the plan is set to make a chain reaction we must suspend lumps of uranium within the nuclear catalyst called a moderator heavy water would be the best moderator but there is none in the United States and perhaps we are already too late in Germany other physicists have a year head start in Czechoslovakia they acquire a major supply of uranium ore and in Norway they acquire the world's only significant source of heavy water the combination was ominous while the British set out to destroy the Norwegian plant we searched desperately for a substitute at Columbia fermions Allard Anderson and zenrin make the first tentative tests of a new moderator material graphite a four inch square bar of filthy dirty slippery carbon good for pencils good for making arc lamps good for oiling locks and now good for splitting atoms cut the long logs into blocks drill them with holes and fill the holes with uranium then take the bricks and build a pile the result a graphite cake filled with the uranium raisins is it really this easy well no there really isn't any uranium metal to speak of in the whole United States there is less than a couple of ounces not enough uranium not enough graphite but there is enough to assemble about an 8-foot cube and from this we can take some measurements but the uranium is not good enough the graphite is not pure enough over and over small piles are assembled always testing newer and purer materials about this time british scientists reached a dramatic conclusion they estimated that as little as twenty pounds of u-235 could make a bomb Conant and Bush were convinced they launched an all-out effort to produce the bomb only one day before Pearl Harbor [Music] for parallel crash programs were begun three concentrated on techniques to separate u-235 the fourth the plutonium project was placed under the supervision of Nobel laureate Arthur Compton no longer was plutonium production a laboratory experiment now it was a military program I met dr. Compton at that time and of course like everyone who met dr. Compton you could not help but be impressed by the his enthusiasm his earnestness and his complete confidence in success I spent the morning going around the laboratory and after considerable discussions with dr. Compton I was impressed with the idea that they had of attacking their problems on all sorts of different directions and not arriving at a decision for example they had five different methods that they were talking about for cooling the pile now it was it just wasn't practical from a management standpoint an engineering standpoint as well as a research angel' to proceed on five different things when it there wasn't any advantage to be gained from it within weeks Compton's crash program to develop a plutonium producing pile had committed over a million dollars although no one had yet achieved a chain reaction he laid out a timetable for completion of the project [Music] by January 1943 to achieve the first chain reaction by January 1944 to separate the first plutonium by January 1945 to deliver the first bomb it seemed certain by now that sufficiently pure materials would sustain a chain reaction but it was not at all clear whether such materials could be produced the most minut impurity could effectively block any reaction there was only a single producer of large quantities of graphite the national carbon company and in canada the only significant uranium mined in the Western Hemisphere was being activated to produce uranium in large quantities until now uranium had been only a scientific curiosity a metal powder which occasionally burst into flames spontaneously at Iowa State University Frank Spedding a chemist who had worked with similar materials developed a new technique for producing the metal into containers was loaded a mixture of calcium and uranium salt when ignited the reaction produced a heavy ingot of substantially pure uranium there was a great deal of curiosity on the campus as to what we were doing particularly as we once in a while one of our leotards have blow up and with a magnesium which is what you use in flash powder they would light up the whole building and it gave a illusion I it was the light was so bright that the building swelled up and then something and the press the college press office was right across the street from this building so nicely their curiosity was very great but nobody would talk though they didn't know what was going on now Compton was and I told Compton that the only one that I knew of that produced the job was DuPont and I talked to the DuPont people and it was arranged finally they agreed that they would do the job well I must say that this whole field was so new to us and so strange that we weren't sure whether these people were crazy or whether they weren't it was completely unprecedented the only thing we felt we could add to it actually was our knowledge and experience in designing and operating plants of great substance and great magnitude so that we had been impressed with the enormous importance of this venture in terms of winning the war furthermore we recognized this this was a potential engine of great destructive power and we didn't want to make any money out of it so we decided as a matter of patriotism if you want to use that somewhat hackneyed word that we should devote our talents for the service of our government in a critical time we should devote our talents without trying to earn a fee small or substantial out of it November and the pile begins not another test this time but a full-scale attempt to start a chain reaction this will be the 31st pile bigger and with better materials if the new pile is big enough it ought to go but because there is so little material so variable in quality we must be miserly make every bit of uranium country no rectangular pile this time we need the most efficient pattern for our small supply of material round in the middle where it will do the most good we will put the uranium metal around this we will put the weaker uranium oxide always with the best material toward the center and the poorer toward the outside and of course as always the material must be formed in lumps and between these the graphite moderator under and around the graphite is wood to carry the load and fill in the corners of the big block and what if there isn't quite enough material or what if the material isn't quite good enough then what we can do one last thing we can take out the air between the bricks so just in case we order from Goodyear a square balloon just the right size to fit around the pile of carbon blocks and if we must will pump out the air [Music] as fast as material arrives at his sawed and planed drilled and turned and pressed and stacked in the ever-growing pile here are actual photographs taken as the pile progressed layer on layer of graphite bricks and uranium eggs but size is not enough because if it works this pile Chicago pile number one will need to be controlled here's how into the pile we will add rods of cadmium which soak up neutrons as long as these rods are in the pile there can be no reaction but pull them out push them in these are the control rods which will turn it on and turn it off there are three sets first a set of motor driven rods controlled from the balcony these will be used for a course control of the reaction second one additional rod for fine control this will be pulled out by hand last running right through the center of the pile is an emergency rod in case of trouble this emergency rod will be pulled into the pile by a rope attached to a heavy weight day by day the pile grows higher week after week the crews work at making the graphite breaks and pressing the lumps of uranium oxide this is not a little experimental 400 tons of graphite 50 tons of uranium 40 thousand bricks to be sawed and planed and drilled and stacked 20 mm Joe rhenium slugs to press and place graphite was being received from several manufacturers and this material when it arrived was in rather unusable form because as it was made it had surface roughness and actually a little distortion and the bars of graphite which didn't permit its direct use so these bars had to be machined and we set up a machining Sylvia the word facility is a little bit grand for what we had we put some machines and some ventilation into a room in the squash court and proceeded to square up the bars and cut them to the right length my objective is always to equal better the performance of them during the day so we I and my group always put on the same number or one more layer and and then we went home so it wasn't really a 24 hour shift but it was more like 16 or 18 hours now while he said wouldn't let me work much good because you see everybody wear overalls and goggles and a mask against the dust so everyone wants to like and a miner's cap you know regular stripe a blue ticking workman's cap so everyone looked alike and he said in KC and to say nasty words of somebody to be a girl was excluded from actual construction although I was in and out every day which calibration standard measuring the growing new trend clocks out that reactor as it added layer by layer it was a very hard driving operation there were people cutting the graphite carrying it stacking it drilling it and of course there was a graphite dust everywhere I think was black I remember one night when we were pushing these things we'll use just ordinary woodworking tools see and we were pushing these through the chop through the planer the hair was then Rico Fermi stripped alloys pushing these graphite blocks through they threw a shaper just listened absolutely clear louise ways woman just totally graphite dust in every direction you know he could have had a part Nortel oh that would have made him a internationally recognized as a one of the artistes of all time John one could've had a color photograph of rabbit would give a worthless many fortune December to a cold winter day and under the stands the steam lines of quit working in the beastly cold with the snow creaking underfoot the scientists gather and now the test begins the first control rods are pulled out and the emergency rod is tied in place step by step inch by inch family calls for the control rod to be withdrawn bit by bit the rod is pulled and each time the intensity Rises each time Fermi predicts the level where the rise will stop closer and closer to the point where it will not stop by the rail norm Hillberry stands ready with a hatchet to cut the line holding the emergency rod quite frankly it never occurred to act would really have to be swamped any more than I am sure it ever occurred to all grades with everybody's bottles down because they saw above the pile just in case our bottles of cadmium salt solution ready to flood the pile and stop the reaction in case of trouble last words tremon he said to him was now if this is the final emergency if the thing that's away from my sure to break this buddy said I want you to know that you watch me and if I drop dead and you're to bake it if I'm alive oh I'll use this legend on you now one last pull and the rise will not stop the counters will continue to rise until we choose to turn it off point to safety yes sir that's which had been set to us to a certain maximum flux began to give a a bell signal and that people want to still to go a little higher so they simply pulled the wires off the bill thickness a twin ring went a little higher and then immediately ahead to the bomb from that minute I we were in a war my brother was running flamethrower I don't Kanawa when we dropped the bomb Japan maybe we needn't have done it but um if we'd had an invasion it's clear there would have been millions of casualties on both side and my brother would have been in the first wave of that invasion [Music] we live in the Atomic Age tomorrow's power is here and we will live to see most of our electricity come from the atom huge plutonium producing reactors direct descendants of cp1 will make their own fuel and de salt water to irrigate the desert tomorrow's medicine begins with the atom in chemistry and industry we benefit more and more from the new technology and who can say where it all began we are all part of a silver chain that leads from Greece and stretches out of sight cp1 was not the key that unlocked the door rather it is a shining link in a complex and elaborate chain of events a gleaming marker on a rising curve of scientific knowledge which has changed the world who can say when the Atomic Age began cp1 is a convenient point to say it began about here [Music] [Applause] [Music]