Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1962-12-02
BY SID MOODY
Associated Press staff Writer

AAAohC JOA VAIN w hCCP AASNAAAbs
When Dick Adams and his
three friends shut the door be-
hind them, they were the last
players that day to use the court.
And the last ever. s,.
The next day the court was
closed. Government business. was
the terse explanation. That was
enough. There was a war on.
People didn't ask too many ques-
tons around the campus of the
University of Chicago.
Some days later Adams. who
had his own key, let himself into
a storeroom to get something.
That was odd. There were q num-
Der Of containers marked "urani-
UNI" Why uranium? You don't
suppose :. :?
Adams, a knowledgeable chem
istry student, had guessed the
squash courts secret.
The world was not to know
for three years more, not until
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For
there, in the slate-walled court,
man for the first time proved he
could tamper with the very heart
Of his universe, the atom.
Bomb Of Mony Origins
The atom bomb was not born
there. 1t has many origins. What
happened 20 years ago, on Deem
Der Q, 1912, back in another age,
was that a group Of men includ-
ing q carpenter, Nobel Prize
winner and q Missouri farm boy
achieved the worlds first nuclear
chain reaction.
The reaction produced only as
much power as a lit match. ran
for a few brief minutes. Yet that
reaction has really never stopped.
It rides in the belly Of a SAC
bomber. It's poised on a pad some
where behind the Urals. It's there,
unseen, in the halls Of the U. N.
And It's also in a power plant
near Pittsburgh, glowing behind its
lead shield in a cancer hospital,
driving a merchantmen over the
Atlantic.
The road to December 2, 1912
was as bizarre as any science has
travelled. 1t went by way Of a
goldfish pond in Rome and a snow
covered path in Sweden. Adolf
Hitler helped and so did the CO.
lumbia football team, an absent
minded professor, a group of Chi
cago high school students and an
Italian physicist named Enrico
Fermi, he most of all.
Fermi's Experiments
FermI was one Of number of
scientists back in the 1930s who
were exploring the atom. He had
been experimenting with the bonn
bardment of all the elements,
starting with the lightest, with
radon, a gas derived from radium.
and berilium. The radon shot
neutrons into the heart of the
atoms of whatever was being
tested.
Methodically Fermi went
through the elements up to the
last and heaviest of all. uranium.
With uranium he found odd
things happening.
Fermi found when he bonn
barded uranium with neutrons,
there was evidence it produced
an even heavier element. There
was more but Fermi and his group
didn't see it.
A strip of aluminium foil three
thousandths of an inch thick
placed in their experiment to
curb excessive radiation prevented
them from seeing on their re-
cording instrument the vast
amounts of energy given off dur
ing uranium bombardment.
Two years later, in 1886, team
of Swiss physicists making similar
experiments forgot to insert the
foil and saw that immense energy
released was being recorded. They
thought the machine was out of
whack and thenceforth always re-
membered to insert the foil.
Unknowing they and Fermi al
most certainly split the uranium
atom with a consequent ire
mendous burst Of energy, just as
Albert Einstein had predicted
years before. But science had said
1t was impossible to split the
atom. Man could never accumu-
late sufficient energy to do it.
In France Irene Joliot- Curie,
daughter of the famous Marie
Curie. was also bombarding ura-
mum, believed this had produced
new elements unknown to man
and was puzzled at the apparent
presence of another element,
lanthanum. in the reaction. Lam
thanum was about half the weight
of uranium.
In Berlin. in late 1888, otto
Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had
found the same phenomenon. ele-
ments of about half the weight
of uranium produced by lombard
ing uranium, Could the atom have
been split?
Lise Neither, a colleague of
Hahn's who had fled Germany be-
cause of the Jewish persecution,
decided II had when told by Hahn
OF his experiments. She argued
her views with her nephew. Otto
Frisch, as they walked along the
snowy countryside near Goteborg
Sweden, several weeks later.
Convinced. Frisch went to Co
penhagen TO tell the Danish ply
sicist. Niels Bohr Bohr clappeo
himself on the forehead: How
could we have missed 1t all this
timer"
Finally, man knew.
Word to the U. S.
Bohr had planned 10 leave FOL
the United States the next da!
TO confer with Einstein and wher
he arrived January l6, 1899 hi
news OF fission was a bombshell