Quotes from Richard Rhodes

One of the expert witnesses against Abraham Gesner in the trial challenging his Canadian bitumen mining claims had been Benjamin Silliman Jr., an 1837 Yale College graduate and subsequently a professor of chemistry there.

By 1963, more than 98 percent of US gasoline was leaded. When, a decade later, lead was finally ordered removed from the US gasoline supply, it was removed because it fouled the new catalytic converters mandated to fight smog, a different air pollution problem, not because it had been labeled a dangerous pollutant itself.

It took Drake more than a year to find someone to drill his well. One salt-well driller after another refused him or failed to appear when promised. His standards were high.

Eventually 395 million troy ounces of silver—13,540 short tons—went off from the West Point Depository to be cast into cylindrical billets, rolled into 40-foot strips and wound onto iron cores at Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee. Solid-silver bus bars a square foot in cross section crowned each racetrack's long oval. The silver was worth more than $300 million

The discovery of slow-neutron radioactivity meant that Fermi's group had to work its way through the elements again looking for different and enhanced half-lives—which is to say, different isotopes and decay products.

The steady seepage into Oil Creek argued for a substantial underground reservoir. To find that reservoir and tap it would require investment. Silliman, the two men hoped, would certify the value of the petroleum to potential investors.

No matter what you do with the rest of your life, nothing will be as important to the future of the World as your work on this Project right now.

About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.727

Lacking any other way to locate oil underground—dowsing and consulting spiritualists would come later—Drake chose to drill in the middle of the narrow island formed by Oil Creek on one side and, on the other, the water-powered sawmill's millrace (a channel to divert water to a mill wheel).

Szilard began explaining. "Five or ten minutes" later, he says, Einstein understood. After only a year of university physics, Szilard had worked out a rigorous mathematical proof that the random motion of thermal equilibrium could be fitted within the framework of the phenomenological theory in its original, classical form, without reference to a limiting atomic model—"and [Einstein] liked this very much.

The two men who consulted with Silliman Jr. were George H. Bissell and Jonathan G. Eveleth, partners in the Wall Street law firm of Eveleth & Bissell.

With the special tools of ultramicrochemistry the young chemists could work on undiluted quantities of chemicals as slight as tenths of a microgram (a dime weighs about 2.5 grams— 2,500,000 micrograms). They would manage their manipulations on the mechanical stage of a binocular stereoscopic microscope adjusted to 30-power magnification.

One of Szilard's sidelines, then and later, was invention. Between 1924 and 1934 he applied to the German patent office individually or jointly with his partner Albert Einstein for twenty-nine patents.

Man-made death became epidemic in the twentieth century because increasingly efficient killing technologies made the extreme exercise of national sovereignty pathological.

In 1849 a Titusville sawmill owner, Ebenezer Brewer, had sent to his son Francis Brewer, a young physician practicing in Vermont, five gallons of Seneca oil from the creek that ran below his sawmill, "with the assurance," his son said later, "that it possessed great medicinal and curative properties.

On February 27, 1932, in a letter to the British journal Nature, physicist James Chadwick of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, Ernest Rutherford's laboratory, announced the possible existence of a neutron.

They decided to try to increase its flow and hired a local man, Jacob D. Angier, to do the work. On 4 July 1853, the sawmill owners signed a lease with Angier, the first oil lease known to have been executed in the United States.

The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy; but when a "bomb" is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.

I thought it wasn't worth it, I thought no war is worth all this, this misery and this horror. Perhaps no war is, not even that first desperate war against fascism to which the Spanish people were abandoned by the democracies and by the Soviet Union as well, so that of Spain's 24 million souls, fully half a million died directly, or from hunger and disease, or immediately afterward in Franco's hundred thousand vindictive executions.

Silliman called fractional distillation "tedious," and, in fact, it took him more than three weeks to complete the experiment. But he identified seven different component oils mixed together in the crude petroleum, ranging in color, viscosity, and odor

required the development of new kinds of plastics. (The seal material that eventually served at Oak Ridge came into its own after the war under the brand name Teflon.)

Later that day Frisch looked me up and said, "You work in a microbiology lab. What do you call the process in which one bacterium divides into two?" And I answered, "binary fission." He wanted to know if you could call it "fission" alone, and I said you could.

Distilling these mixtures in turn came to be called "cracking" them—breaking them open, as it were.

It is agreed between us First, that we will never use this agency against each other. Secondly, that we will not use it against third parties without each other's consent. Thirdly, that we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.