Quotes from Richard Rhodes

mid-June 1915, "the wind was favourable and we discharged a very poisonous gas, a mixture of chlorine and phosgene, against the [Russian] enemy lines. . . .344 Not a single shot was fired. . . . The attack was a complete success."345

By 1870, investment in the US oil industry had reached $200 million, the equivalent of almost $4 billion today. Annual production in Pennsylvania alone totaled more than 4.8 million barrels. Only cotton accounted for more US export dollars.

Within three years, a Russian diplomat in Saint Petersburg who was an amateur experimenter, Baron Pavel L'vovitch Schilling, had begun designing a telegraph system based on Oersted's discoveries. Schilling demonstrated the system to Czar Alexander I sometime before the Czar's death in 1825.

he had worked under Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish and had designed and built the Harvard cyclotron that now served the Manhattan Project's purposes on the Hill.

Oersted's discovery that an electrified wire generated a magnetic field around it drew Faraday to search for the reverse phenomenon: electricity induced in a wire wrapped around a magnet. When that experiment failed—he was one of many who tried it—he began a long series of experiments trying every conceivable arrangement of wires and magnets.

Oppenheimer first described the so-called tunnel effect whereby an uncertainly located particle sails through the electrical barrier around the nucleus on a light breeze of probability, existing—in particle terms—then ceasing to exist, then instantly existing again on the other side.549 But George Gamow, the antic Russian, lecturing in Cambridge, devised the tunnel-effect equations that the experimenters used.

In further experiments with permanent magnets and coils, he obtained a consistent result: only when the magnet was moved briskly in relation to the coil did the galvanometer's needle move.

Like his competitors, Faraday was looking for a steady electric current from magnetism. He held back reporting his results.

In an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did.

Dr. Clara Immerwahr Haber committed suicide the same night.

By 1933, with a departmental budget above $2,000 a year, ten times the budget of most Italian physics departments

In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from "normal" positions, and taking risks by departing from reality.

The source of power in Papin's engine wasn't steam but the weight of the atmosphere acting on the vacuum the condensing steam left behind. So increasing the power of his engine required using a larger volume of steam in larger cylinders that could entrain a larger column of atmosphere. At the time, no one knew how to manufacture such large-scale machinery. Papin hoped his new engine might be a major inducement to its development.

Man is not satisfied with a happy idyllic life: he has the need to fight and to encounter danger.

Falling water is the oldest source of industrial power other than muscle.

The IBM equipment arrived early in April 1944 and the Theoretical Division immediately put it to good use running brute-force implosion numbers.

an excessive and unproductive deference of British physics students to their seniors. He therefore founded a club, the

Kapitza Club, devoted to open and unhierarchical discussion. Membership was limited and coveted. Members met in college rooms and

In 1841 two American engineers calculated the energy available from the falls for turning waterwheels at 4.5 million horsepower. The US Army Corps of Engineers, surveying the Great Lakes in 1868, estimated Niagara's total available energy as about 6 million horsepower

That I was named to head the [Theoretical] division," Bethe comments, "was a severe blow to Teller, who had worked on the bomb project almost from the day of its inception and considered himself, quite rightly, as having seniority over everyone then at Los Alamos, including Oppenheimer.

Britain, despite its roads, began shifting to wheeled transport early in the seventeenth century.

Shipments of coal from Newcastle upon Tyne, an expanding coal port on the Tyne River in the northeast of England, increased accordingly from about thirty-five thousand tons in the midsixteenth century to about four hundred thousand tons by 1625. In two generations, the historian J. U. Nef concludes, "the coal trade from the Tyne had multiplied twelvefold."22

Larger mines with direct access to the surface had long been laid with wooden rails to make coal and ore carts easier to move; moving a cart on rails required about one-sixth the effort needed to haul a sled or a cart on a dirt path.38 Moving coal to water on such rails—wagonways, they were called—would save money, time, and wear and tear. The earliest known English wagonway dates from 1604.

Wigner told me of Hahn's discovery.1030 Hahn found that uranium breaks into two parts when it absorbs a neutron. . . . When I heard this I immediately saw that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted . . . then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.