Quotes from Richard Rhodes

Silliman had struck oil—oil suitable for lighting.

Petroleum was hard to sell because it was costly to transport by wagon and smelled terrible in its raw state. Refining it required moving it from Oil Creek to one of the many refineries, most of them small, that sprang up between Titusville and Pittsburgh. But swampy or frozen dirt trails slick with spilled oil played hell with caravans of up to one hundred wagons loaded with thousands of gallons of barreled oil.

Soviet physicists realized in 1940 that the United States must also be pursuing a program when the names of prominent physicists, chemists, metallurgists and mathematicians disappeared from international journals: secrecy itself gave the secret away.

Our regime," Franco announced grandly, "is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections.

We call such a prohibition a curfew, a word derived from Norman French covre le feu: "cover the fire!

If most of the area of habitat is destroyed, and a fraction of the area is saved as a reserve, the reserve will initially contain more species than it can hold at equilibrium. The excess will gradually go extinct. The smaller the reserve, the higher will be the extinction rates…. Different species require different minimum areas to have a reasonable chance of survival.

Wrought iron began to replace cast iron before 1820, when a Northumberland railway engineer named John Birkinshaw patented a method of rolling wrought iron rails in various shapes in fifteen-foot lengths that could withstand the weight of steam locomotives pounding and running over them.

His problem, his son believed, was "too many irons in the fire": a nice cliché for an industrialist and inventor who worked with kilns. "One by one, his inventions fell into other hands, some by fair sale, but most of them by piracy, when it became known that he had nothing left wherewith to maintain his rights. In short, with seven children to provide for, he found himself a ruined man."12

Of Thursday, August 20, 1942, Seaborg writes: Perhaps today was the most exciting and thrilling day I have experienced since coming to the Met Lab. Our microchemists isolated pure element 94 for the first time!

free of carrier material. . . .1606 This precipitate of 94, which was viewed under the microscope and which was also visible to the naked eye, did not differ visibly from the rare-earth fluorides. . . . It is the first time that element 94 . . . has been beheld by the eye of man.

By 1942 the Cornell physicist had established himself as a theoretician of the first rank. His most outstanding contribution, for which he would receive the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics, was to elucidate the production of energy in stars, identifying a cycle of thermonuclear reactions involving hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen that is catalyzed by carbon and culminates in the creation of helium.

Teller told me that the fission bomb was all well and good and, essentially, was now a sure thing. In reality, the work had hardly begun. Teller likes to jump to conclusions. He said that what we really should think about was the possibility of igniting deuterium by a fission weapon—the hydrogen bomb.

The date of the trial, Tuesday, 21 February 1804, marked the first time a steam locomotive running on rails hauled a loaded train of freight cars—in this case, about twenty-five tons of engine, iron, wagons, and men.

Some minerals—iron ore, coal—remain fixed where they are found and can be counted as property. Others—water, oil, natural gas—move underground in unknown channels, sometimes to the detriment of other potential users.

Each kilogram of heavy hydrogen equaled about 85,000 tons TNT equivalent.1622 Theoretically, 12 kilograms of liquid heavy hydrogen—26 pounds—ignited by one atomic bomb would explode with a force equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT.

to estimating gas volume based on geological models. Major discoveries—the Panhandle Field in 1918 in North Texas, the Hugoton Field in 1922 around the conjunction of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas—eased early concerns about premature depletion. Panhandle and Hugoton together accounted for about 16 percent of total twentieth-century US natural-gas reserves, some 117 trillion cubic feet.

All war is immoral. Logically, the 100 percent pacifist has the only impregnable position.

town gas boosted to higher heat content with natural gas. By 1940, the national network of gas pipelines, though far from complete, spidered from Texas and Louisiana up through the Middle West and eastward into Pennsylvania.

Wet gas—gas that flowed mixed with petroleum—was routinely vented into the atmosphere or flared off. Gas was often left to vent into the air, sometimes for years, when drillers abandoned dry holes. A 1935 US Federal Trade Commission report to Congress estimated that 20 percent more gas was wasted nationwide between 1919 and 1930 than was consumed:

The hard work of finding a proving ground sufficiently barren and remote and organizing it fell to a compact, close-cropped Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge.

Though the question of global warming had not yet emerged to public perception, natural gas—methane—is about thirty times more effective than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. No one has calculated how much the vast waste of natural gas across the decades of the twentieth century—in the United States and throughout the world—contributed to global warming. The percentage was certainly more than zero.

Then he started to talk about the role of the scientist," Teller recalls, "who has been accused of inventing deadly weapons.1324 He concluded: 'If the scientists in the free countries will not make weapons to defend the freedom of their countries, then freedom will be lost.

So the arguments progressed across the pleasant Berkeley summer. "We were forever inventing new tricks," Bethe says, "finding ways to calculate, and rejecting most of the tricks on the basis of the calculations. Now I could see at first-hand the tremendous intellectual power of Oppenheimer who was the unquestioned leader of our group. . . . The intellectual experience was unforgettable.

That discovery gave Oersted the law he was looking for, because the needle's positional reversal could mean only that the magnetic field which the electric current generated filled the space adjacent to the wire in circular form around it.