Business: THE MEN AND THE BOMB

In 1945, the men of the year in U.S. business were obscure. They were so by necessity. For the superlative job of production which made them the men of the year had to be carried out in the deepest, most impenetrable obscurity. They were the men who produced the bomb.

The technical brains and the production skills of more than 2,000 companies were picked to do the job. From that vast array, it was impossible to pick out one man, or two, and say flatly: “These were the men who made the bomb.” But it was possible to pick out a handful of men without whom the bomb might not have been made. Major Gen. Leslie R. Groves was one of them. Among the others:

¶ Percival C. “Dobie” Keith, a ruddy-faced, blue-eyed engineer with a lock of brown hair over his eye, who bossed the Kellex Corp., the “industrial cooperative” that designed and operated Oak Ridge.

¶ Crawford H. Greenewalt, the greying, hawk-nosed director and chemist of du Pont (son-in-law of Irenee du Pont) who got the Hanford project in production.

¶ E. V. Murphree, vice president of Standard Oil Development Corp., who had the persuasive ability, when anyone doubted that the bomb could be made, of making him see the feasibility of the entire program.

¶ Lewis Burrie Swift, president of Rochester’s Taylor Instrument Cos., which turned out 40,000 instruments for Oak Ridge, more than had been needed in the synthetic rubber and high octane programs combined.

Some of the things which these men did and the companies they worked with (Chrysler Corp., General Electric, Westinghouse Electric and Union Carbide & Carbon) can now be told.

Plant before Design. In the Oak Ridge plant, 6,000 centrifugal pumps were needed which would send a viciously corrosive gas through pipes. There was no time to design such a pump, then tool up a factory to produce it. So Allis-Chalmers took on the job of building the factory first, tooling it up and training the workers, then waiting for the pump to be designed.

The factory was idle for six months. But when the pump was finally designed, Allis-Chalmers had its plant so well planned that it turned out all the pumps needed within ten months.

The Houdaille-Hershey Corp. was asked to make a screen fine enough to .screen out U-235 atoms as they came bouncing through the pipes. It succeeded even though it could not discover why its process worked. Nevertheless they turned out hundreds of acres of such screens. The notable contribution of Chrysler was something which sounded simple—nickel-plating the all-important pipes. The trick that had to be done was to nickel-plate them inside. Not until Chrysler turned the trick could Oak Ridge operate.

Tools without Priorities. Most notable of all, in war industries often starved for materials, was the way in which the gigantic job was done without hampering any other war production. The bomb had top priority for all materials, yet the priority was seldom used. Example: one $30,000,000 contract used only $25,000 in top priorities.

No Work for Congress. Repeatedly, industry did the wildly improbable. For example, G.E. built instruments to detect leaks and tell how fast, and in what quantity, gas was going through the pipes, by merely attaching an instrument to the outside. Time & again, companies were asked to design a machine according to a “mathematical formula which they did not fully understand.” Out of this amazing gadgetry have already come scores of new products, or processes, which have nothing to do with atomic power, such as new ways to dehydrate foodstuffs.

Most of the businessmen did not even know what they were working on. This bothered them only when they thought that the project, whatever it was, might fail. Du Pont, still trying to live down the “merchant of death” tag, worried most of all. If the project flopped, they were aware of the countless investigations they would face for years to come. As General Groves said, his mind on the $2 billions spent: “If it works, Congress won’t investigate it. If it doesn’t work, Congress won’t investigate anything else.”