Quotes from Richard Rhodes

Workers collected crude turpentine, the liquid resin of the longleaf pine, by "boxing": cutting a large, chevron-shaped drainage into a tree with a deep notch below it that collected the liquid, which was then scooped out and barreled.

Robert Oppenheimer moved to Santa Fe with a small team of aides on March 15, 1943, brisk early spring. Scientists and their families arrived by automobile and train during the next four weeks. Not much was ready on the mesa, which they began to call the Hill.

The value of turpentine production in the United States approached $7.5 million in 1860 ($210 million today), of which North Carolina accounted for more than $5 million.

By the 1850s, turpentine production was declining in America. A new competitor surged into the lamp oil market: coal oil, distilled from cannel coal (oil shale) or asphalt/bitumen, a heavy hydrocarbon found naturally in semisolid pools such as Pitch Lake on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

wouldn't turn away . . . but having made all those calculations, I thought the blast might be rather bigger than expected. So I put on some suntan lotion.

A Canadian physician and entrepreneur named Abraham Gesner pioneered the development of coal oil, initially as a source of coal gas for lighting.

If destructive technology amplifies violence, constructive technology amplifies compassion, and the lessons of technology are universal.

Gesner concentrated on developing a fuel for lighting. He used the pitch he had collected in Trinidad as feedstock, conducting some two thousand separate experiments. By 1846, he had successfully distilled coal oil, as it was commonly called, from this bitumen.

Only when they had diluted their leaded gasoline by more than 1,000 to 1 were they able to produce knocking. Midgley rushed off to tell Kettering, who said later that day was the most dramatic of his entire research career.47 The new compound needed a name. For reasons never revealed, Kettering chose "ethyl," which confused it with ethyl alcohol and left out the significant fact that it was a soluble compound of lead, a substance long known to be poisonous.

Anne Harrington de Santana, has discerned that nuclear weapons have acquired the status of fetish objects; like the coin of the realm in relation to commodities, our glittering warheads have become markers of national power: "Just as access to wealth in the form of money determines an individual's opportunities and place in a social hierarchy, access to power in the form of nuclear weapons determines a state's opportunities and place in the international order.

Adding to the smoke of burning coal, from about the middle of the eighteenth century, the "dark Satanic mills" of William Blake's 1808 poem "Jerusalem" began strewing their blight across England's green and pleasant land.

Lead has been a known poison since Classical times. It sickened Midgley himself and three coworkers in the winter of 1922–23, causing Midgley to spend a month in Florida recovering.

In a matter of months, the Canadian physician developed a distinctive process for making illuminating gas from bitumen with coal oil as an intermediary. When he applied for a Nova Scotia patent on his process in June 1849, he used the patent to protect his products' brand names as well, calling them kerosene and kerosene gas (from keros, Greek for "wax," and -ene to associate the new products with familiar camphene).

Gesner's US patents were issued in June 1854. For feedstock, his company would initially use cannel coal from New Brunswick.

there are not many horrors as efficient for the generation of deep anger and terrible lifelong insecurity as the inability of a father to protect his child.

Szilard's good friend and fellow Hungarian, the theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, who was studying chemical engineering at the Technische Hochschule at the time of Szilard's conversion, watched him take the University of Berlin by storm.

From 1788 onward, the quantity of iron England produced doubled every eight or ten years, an early industrial version of Moore's law.10 What major product did England manufacture from all that iron? Nails, says Samuel Smiles, the Victorian chronicler, "nails of iron made with pit coal."11 It was still a wooden world, the craftsman's essential tool a hammer.

In the meantime, Gesner kept busy perfecting kerosene. The crude coal oil that emerged from his stills smoked badly when it burned and smelled worse. After treating the oil with acids and processing it with lime, he succeeded in creating a kerosene that burned, he reported, "with a brilliant white light [and] without smoke or the naphthalous odor so offensive in many hydrocarbons having some resemblance to this but possessing very different properties.

By 1936, 90 percent of all US gasoline was leaded. Domestic consumption of tetraethyl lead reached a high of 5.1 million pounds in 1956. In 1959 the US Public Health Service supported an Ethyl Corporation request to increase the lead content of gasoline from 3 cc to 4 cc per gallon—because refiners had reached a limit in improving fuel through refining and were now losing yield to keep up octane.

The railroad, when it came, would meet high expectations. It came quickly enough, but before the necessary technologies converged into a successful system, variety flourished. Passengers were first carried on 25 March 1807 on the Oystermouth Tramroad on the Gower Peninsula in Swansea, northwest of Cardiff in Wales. The cars were horse-drawn, and the operator paid tolls to the company that owned the road.

Coal-oil production in early 1860 totaled some 20,000 to 30,000 gallons per day, or about 7 million to 9 million gallons per year.22 By comparison, the whale-oil harvest had peaked in 1854 at about 10.3 million gallons and begun a sharp decline.

They needed to understand how neutrons would diffuse through the core and the tamper. They needed a theory of the explosion's hydrodynamics—the complex dynamic motions of its fluids, which the core and tamper would almost instantly become as their metals heated from solid to liquid to gas.

The MP's hunted antelope with machine guns for fresh meat and for sport. Groves authorized only cold showers for his troops; their isolated duty would win them eventual award for the lowest VD rate in the entire U.S. Army.

Trinity would be the largest physics experiment ever attempted up to that time.