Atom-Harnessing Marked

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31542, 2 December 1967, Page 13

Atom-Harnessing Marked

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) CHICAGO, Dec. 1,

The “midwives” of the nuclear age gathered on the University of Chicago campus today to commemorate the moment a quarter of a century ago when man first controlled the energy locked in the atom.

The historic harnessing of the prime energy source in matter, which simultaneously gave birth to the terror of the nuclear bomb and the hope of limitless power for peace and plenty, came on a cold, dark afternoon 25 years ago on a squash court beneath the university’s football stadium. It was at 3.25 p.m. on December 2, 1942, at the height of World War II that the late Dr Enrico Fermi, the Italianborn Nobel prize-winning physicist, leaned over the squash court’s balcony and

instructed Dr George Weil, a member of his scientific team, to pull out one of three cadmium-plated control rods “another foot” from a labori-ously-built graphite and uranuim pile. Dr Fermi, who had left Italy before the war because of his opposition to fascism and directed and organised the construction of the crude atomic pile beneath the football stands of Stagg field, suddenly smiled, closed his slide rule and announced: “The reaction is self-sustaining.” The experiment lasted 28 minutes and the nuclear age had begun. Thirty-three of the 42 scientists who witnessed the historic scene which confirmed the feasability of the atomic bomb and the tapping of a new source of unlimited energy were back at the campus today to take stock of events the new age unleashed.

The two-day commemoration will come to a climax tomorrow when the Fermi team of scientists —those still living—gather on the spot where

the first atomic pile once stood to watch Fermi’s widow unveil a 12ft high bronze sculpture by British artist, Henry Moore. Moore's bronze sculpture, “Nuclear Energy,” compared by some to the mushroomshaped terror cloud of the atom age and by others as a burgeoning cloud symbolising life, will be unveiled at the precise moment that Dr Fermi’s pile first became “critical.” For the scientists who were present in the squish court the counters clicking their message 25 years ago spelled the greatest human achievement since prehistoric man discovered fire. The only woman among them, Mrs Leona Marshall Libby, then a 23-year-old physics students, recalled this week: “It was a tremendously exciting event but, then we thought, ‘now the bomb.’ “We were terrified the Germans were ahead of us. It was the driving thought in every mind that Hitler would become unconquerable.”