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Fathers of the Bomb Part III; Enrico Fermi article by Jennifer Lake Enrico Fermi became a hub at the University of Chicago around which a crucial part of the Manhattan Project was spun, wholly dependent on the success of Fermi and his team to produce a controlled nuclear 'reactor'. This feat was accomplished December 2, 1942, a year after the U.S. joined the war and set the race for a weapon in motion with the creation of Chicago Pile #1 (CP-1). Leslie Groves called it "the single most important scientific event in the development of atomic power" and later historians remarked that the "gamble", lacking shields and adequate safety, was a risk of "a possibly catastrophic experiment in one of the most densely populated areas of the nation". The Chicago locale, called the Metallurgical Lab, was a wartime relocation of the project originally at Columbia University in midtown New York City. For our eternal posterity, CP-1 sustained a 28 minute chain reaction that was jubilantly communicated by Arthur Compton as "the Italian navigator has landed in the New World" where the natives were "friendly". Team member Leo Szilard noted his personal remembrance as a "black day in the history of mankind" but one for which the highest honor in science given by the DoE, is remembered. In 1956, more than a year after Fermi's death from stomach cancer (Nov.28 1954), the Fermi Award became the physics prize of lifetime achievement. Only days before his death, Fermi received his own recognition from President Eisenhower for his life spent in atomic research. Born in 1901, Fermi graduated from the University of Pisa in 1922 in the same year the Fascists took control of the Italian government. Tattered by decades of civil strife in a war of attrition for 'independence' and the devastating losses of WWI, the Italians were looking to the new sciences of chemistry and physics to rebuild their ruined economy. Under the patronage of powerful sponsors, including the famous Guglielmo Marconi and the Volpi di Misurata family, the brilliant Enrico Fermi was poised at the forefront of Italy's new technology renaissance, leading a team of young research physicists at the University of Rome. Helped by the wealthy and well-connected politician Orso Maria Corbino, himself a physicist, the Italian team pooled the academic talents of Italy's best and brightest by all accounts, among them the sons of prominent entrepreneurs and 'freedom fighters'. (1). Fermi met his wife Laura at the University of Rome while he was a professor of chemistry and she was his student, marrying in 1928. Within 3 years, in 1931, Laura's father, Admiral Augusto Capon, became the head of Italy's Naval Intelligence. Other close associates and friends of the Fermis, like physicist Emilio Segre, also had family of high military rank that had served the revolutions and transferred their loyalty to the Mussolini regime. (2). In the gathering storm of war to come, emergent in the 1930s, the Jewish families of Capon and Segre were among many whose members sought an exit --- Italy enacted its race laws in 1938, designed to dismiss 'undesirables' from positions of influence as had Germany before it. Enrico and Laura with their two small children, baptized as Catholics on the advice of Laura's mother Costanza, stayed until the end of 1938 and used the opportunity of a Nobel Prize to travel to Stockholm and subsequently pay their passage to the United States with the prize money. Fermi had secured a teaching post at Columbia after turning down several other offers at American schools and thus 'fled' to his new home in New York. Fermi always looked upon the years of the 20s and 30s as a time of isolation for himself from the active center of physics. After graduation from Pisa in '22 he went to Gottingen in Germany to study with Max Born as did the central cadre of scientists who led the Manhattan Project. In 1924, he left for Leyden/Amsterdam to study under Paul Ehrenfest, working beside Samuel Goudsmit who later hosted him at the University of Michigan over the summer of 1935 while the Italian physicists were making business deals with American companies. Still, meeting and making such friends as Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller, Fermi felt out of the loop, perhaps because internal nationalist expectations may have weighed upon him as much as they supported and propelled him. Fermi was among the first, along with Szilard, to register patents for radio-pharmaceutical isotopes in multiple countries. By 1934, as the physicists on his team were taking their leave for further study, Fermi was demonstrating the fundamentals of chain-reaction that he helped to perfect at the University of Chicago in 1942. Edward Teller, who worked beside Fermi in Rome for a time in 1932 and 33 said that Fermi "suspected...that he had opened the door to the transuranic elements...He had the right theory but the wrong experimental information. Had he guessed the right result, the hunt for chain reactions would have started sooner." Teller reports that Fermi dismissed the results of one Dr. Noddack, who wrote to inform Fermi of observations regarding the potential of chain reactions with transuranics (3). In the years between 1932 and 1936, the entire physics community was applying itself to the fission of transuranics. By 1935 Fermi's representative and buyer of his patents, Gabriello M. Giannini, who had been his former student, established a company in New York City for the purpose of marketing nuclear property. Giannini and Co. took an office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the central establishment of the Rockefeller complex where 2 years before (1933) a gilt statue of Prometheus was commissioned to reign above the promenade. (4). Gabriello Giannini was the son of Torquato Giannini, credited with being a co-founder of the Dante Alighieri Society (DAS, 1889) which promoted Italian language, art, and culture abroad to its constituent diaspora. There is no obvious connection between Giannini's DAS and another DAS literary society formed first at Harvard in 1881 (5), as one can speculate on the presence of the DAS near the Jersey City harbor terminal. Years earlier in 1916, with the U.S. on the cusp of joining WWI, the Jersey DAS was a comfortable stroll from the Black Tom Island shipping jetty that served as the caching station for European bound war materiel. On July 31, 1916, Black Tom Island was overloaded with railcars of munitions that were blown sky-high in the middle of the night, standing as the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history before the bombing of the Oklahoma City Murrah building. The crime was never solved though the prosecutor, John J. McCloy, made his reputation as a lawyer on the case; in time Germany was held accountable by the railroad companies and finally settled its due for reparations in 1953 for 50 million dollars while McCloy went on to serve as the U.S. High Commissioner of occupied Germany in post-WWII. (6). During and after WWII, Giannini and Co. was never satisfactorily compensated for the nuclear patents it owned due to the rules imposed by the Manhattan Project authorities but the company became a U.S. defense contractor just the same, making engines for Lockheed. In the 1950s Giannini pressed for a high-dollar lawsuit against the U.S. government for failing to pay on an agreed amount and then upped the figure punitively to over 10 times that amount. The suit was eventually withdrawn amid fears of anti-communist reprisals, Giannini and Fermi were paid less than the originally negotiated sum and much murmuring ensued among scientists thereafter about working for governments. Giannini's involvement with the Jersey Dante Alighieri Society and the true nature of its activities are a matter of speculation. By 1936, according to scientist/historian Simon Turchetti (7), Fermi and Giannini had patented 60 isotopes intended for use in medicine and private industry. Successful agreements and contacts had been made with Philips Fabriken in Amsterdam, Sharp and Dohme pharmaceutical, and General Electric X-ray Corporation. In this year also the Italians physics team was breaking up. By the time Fermi was preparing to leave Europe in 1938, Giannini's business had "improved substantially" countering somewhat the effects of having his patron mentors, Corbino and Marconi, die in 1937. Fermi claimed to have felt unsupported after their loss. The Jewish team members were well abroad; Bruno Pontecorvo was in France (since 1933) and Emilio Segre had been hired at UC Berkeley where he later participated in the 'discovery' of plutonium. The others, Franco Rasetti and Edouardo Amaldi were routine travelers to the U.S.-- Rasetti landed a job in Quebec, and Amaldi was perched on the edge of spending the war in the U.S. (he did not). Regardless, they were all to meet Fermi again in America as they had many times in the course of their studies and travels. In the small and active society of quantum physics, world travel was common and expected. It reflected the "open world" as Niels Bohr called it, and the world of academics was eager and hungry to devour the moment to moment discoveries of physicists. After the Nobel ceremony in December of 1938, Enrico, Laura and the children sailed for New York and in less than a year's time to come, the world of physics and the world at large irrevocably changed with the outbreak of open war and the announcement of the 'chain reaction'; controlled fission that unlocked and harnessed the power of the atom. The Fermis' departure came nine months after one of Italy's more enduring mysteries in the academic community; the disappearance of Ettore Majorana. Majorana was described as a devout Catholic, perhaps the only religious man on the Fermi team, and a rising star with a brilliant mind that Fermi himself compared to a paradigm-shifting genius like "a Galileo or Newton". (8). In the early 30s, as physicists applied themselves to the theoretical problem-solving of technical challenges, Ettore Majorana contributed key insights that made breakthrough applications possible for the struggling young team. According to the testimony of his teammates, Ettore foresaw the discovery of 'neutrons' (he called them neutral protons) before anyone else was guessing at their existence, and yet his name appears nowhere on the shared patents that later came to prove contentious in the burgeoning marketplace of nuclear development. He was last seen at the end of March 1938, known to have boarded a ship from Sicily on a routine ferry run to Naples. Speculation of foul play and a report that he may have been seen in Argentina all came to naught. The more popular theory contends he was kidnapped by Nazis and murdered. For the scientists who had escaped Europe, the U.S. had ample room and opportunity, even for dedicated foreign communist-socialists like Bruno Pontecorvo on Fermi's team, who was helped by Emilio Segre to get a job in Oklahoma at Wells Surveys, Inc. in 1940. (9). In the escalating Cold War anti-communism that was directly fostered by nuclear weaponry and charges of espionnage, the Jewish Pontecorvo fled the United States, returning to Italy from where he then "defected" to the USSR. Franco Rasetti, who received a teaching post in Quebec, avoided the fray and became a staple member of American academia. Rasetti never worked for the military-complex by his own account and got a professorship at Johns Hopkins from 1947 to his retirement in 1970. (10). More insight was given about Fermi and the various fates of his team by Edouardo Amaldi who gave his loyalty to his native Italy in the aftermath of the wars. Amaldi noted that Fermi was bitter about fascist policies and had been willing to leave Italy forever. Ironically, Amaldi said that it was those years together in fascist Rome, with the comings and goings of the world's brightest young physicists, that were the most free of them all. When Amaldi saw Fermi again after the war, his manner and speech about physics work in the U.S. was measured and constrained, the product of classified research, Amaldi speculated. Fermi's contributions were not merely classified but key operations in creating nuclear weapons. He spent uncounted days at Los Alamos, became a co-director of the Manhattan Project alongside J. Robert Oppenheimer and continued in succeeding roles as a lead scientist and advisor. According to the Oppenheimer biographers, it was Fermi who brought up a suggestion in 1942 that the Allies forego the process of building a bomb and figure instead how to mass irradiate the enemy and contaminate the food supply, a suggestion that was secretly and seriously considered. (11). Despite emphatic rhetoric against it, Fermi committed unswervingly to development of the H-bomb after the war. Fermi's wife Laura became an official history "maker" herself, contracted by the Atomic Energy Commission to write its "official history" following her husbands death. Laura Capon Fermi wrote six books, many short stories and manuscripts, published and unpublished, and kept an active correspondence registered in her papers at the University of Chicago archives. (12). Among her correspondents was the famed neo-con idealogue Leo Strauss, and family members of Oppenheim and Warburg. She is noted for becoming an activist in support of gun control, on the board of the Civic Disarmament Committee, and "conservation" on the Chicago Air Pollution Control Board 1959-1968, winning a victory against the local soot that dirtied up the hanging wash and windowsills. Notes and References The quotes in the opening paragraph provided at http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/cp-1_critical.htm (1)the sons of prominent entrepreneurs, Fermi's team at the University of Rome and patent co-registrants : Emilio Segre, son of hydro-electric and paper-making manufacturer, family of Segre/Treves Bruno Pontecorvo, son of a textile manufacturer Franco Rasetti, Edoardo Amaldi, Ettore Majorana, Giovanni Gentile, Giulio Trabacchi, and Oscar D'Agostino. Giulio Trabacchi became the Director of Italy's Higher Health Institute http://igb.cnr.it/abt/approfondimenti/approf_files/Buzzati_01.doc (2)Admiral Capon, Admiral Segre, and the independence wars in Italy www.jewishmag.com/101mag/italianjews/italianjews.htm (3)from Teller's autobiographical 'Memoirs', Fermi dismisses Dr. Noddick's observations in 1934 about potential chain reaction with transuranics, the by-products of uranium fission (4)Statue of Prometheus, demi-god and bringer of fire to humanity, commissioned in 1933 for 30 Rockefeller Plaza by John D. Rockefeller Jr., with the following inscription: "Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends" (5)Dante Alighieri Society at Harvard, its first 3 presidents: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (2)James Russell Lowell, and (3)Charles Eliot Norton, www.dantealighierisociety.org to promote "universal humanism" or the DAS at 591 Summit Ave. in Jersey City, NJ by NewYork Harbor and the rail lines to Communipaw Terminal and Black Tom Island. (6)Black Tom Island http://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/Pages/B_Pages/Black_Tom_Explosion.htm , tunnnels in place from Jersey City to the southern end of Manhattan were opened in 1908 and built by the Hudson and Manhattan Company run by William Gibbs McAdoo, son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson and Sec. of the Treasury. John J. McCloy, prosecutor of the Black Tom Island case, later with the firm Milbank,Tweed, Hadley and McCloy, was called the 'Chairman of the American Establishment' for his many directing roles including Morgan/Chase Bank, the World Bank, and High Commissioner of occupied Germany after WWII. (7)Simon Turchetti, historical and biographical material on Enrico Fermi, http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/4609/1/Slow_Neutrons.pdf http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/4611/1/Invisible_businessman.pdf (8)Ettore Majorana disappeared, http://astro.physics.sc.edu/~physmgr/CISNP/workshop/Holstein-majorana.pdf and http://articles.gourt.com/en/Ettore%20Majorana , and www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art204.htm (9)Wells Surveys, Inc. of Tulsa, Oklahoma, an original concern of today's giant Baker Hughes Corporation http://bakerhughesdirect.com/cgi/atlas/resources/ExternalFileHandler.jsp?... (10)Franco Rasetti, http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/70/01/OH_Rasetti.pdf spent his last years in a nursing home in Belgium. Edoardo Amaldi who returned to Italy, was offered a 'chair' at the Univ. of Chicago http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4485.html recounted in this oral history produced by Charles Wiener in 1969 (11) ,irradiating the enemy, from 'American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer' authors Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, page 221, "Fermi took Oppenheimer aside one day and suggested another way to kill large numbers of Germans. Perhaps, he said, radioactive fission products could be used to poison Germany's food supply..." (12)Laura Capon Fermi, archived correspondence at the U Chicago library http://ead.lib.uchicago.edu/view.xqy?id=ICU.SPCL.FERMILAURA&c=f&sub=Fermi,Laura and from memoirs of her daughter Nella Fermi Wiener and grandaughter Olivia Fermi www.fermieffect.com |