Charlotte Serber’s badge photo. Courtesy/Project Y
By Heather McClenahan
Los Alamos Historical Society
Many stories about women in the Manhattan Project, such as those of the “Calutron Girls” of Oak Ridge and the “Computers” of Los Alamos, report that the women did not realize the enormity of the project they were working on.
Whether turning dials on big machines or crunching huge mathematical calculations, the women knew they were contributing to the “war effort” but did not know they were assisting in the making of an atomic bomb.
That is not the case with Charlotte Serber, who had an important role in the Tech Area at Los Alamos as the scientific librarian. She not only gathered reference books for the Los Alamos scientists, engineers, and technicians, she also brought to the library top-secret documents about work in nuclear physics.
Charlotte’s husband, Robert Serber, had been a student of project director Robert Oppenheimer and was among the first recruits to the Manhattan Project. He was in charge of getting Los Alamos personnel up to speed on the work, which he accomplished with a lecture series that later became The Los Alamos Primer. He is also credited with naming the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs.
When Charlotte was appointed as the project’s librarian, she had no training in the field. However, she and her husband were close friends of the Oppenheimers, and “Oppie” believed she had the right skills for the job.
When the project first moved to Los Alamos in April 1943, Charlotte had no books for the library. She spent a couple of months working with Oppenheimer’s secretary, Priscilla Greene, getting the director’s office organized, typing up passes, helping get mail delivered, and finding such equipment as typewriters and a mimeograph machine in Santa Fe.
She also did a stint as a counter-espionage spy. At Oppenheimer’s request, she and her husband, along with Priscilla Greene, went to Santa Fe to spread rumors that the top-secret work on “the Hill” was producing electric rockets. After attempting—and failing—to get the attention of locals at two Santa Fe bars, the would-be spies gave up.
Finally, books began arriving in Los Alamos, and Charlotte took up the work she had been hired to do.
“It was a big day when the first shipment of books for my library arrived,” Charlotte wrote in Standing By and Making Do: The Women of Wartime Los Alamos. “I was weary of hearing people remark, after looking around my barren shelves, ‘And in which section do you keep your detective stories?’”
In an interview for the Voices of the Manhattan Project website, Adrienne Lowry, whose husband, Joseph Kennedy, led the chemistry group in Los Alamos, recalled working with Charlotte, saying she “did a fantastic job” as the librarian.
She noted that Charlotte ”had to educate herself about the Library of Congress’ Dewey Decimal System and about how books were catalogued,” but she praised her for building the whole library from scratch.
While the library had bookshelves when it opened, the vault for top-secret reports was not yet complete.
“Finally, an antique safe was located to temporarily store the secret reports,” Charlotte recalled. “It had a unique combination, for although it was a three-tumbler affair, it required a swift kick at one crucial point or it refused to open.”
After the war, Charlotte, the only female group leader on the Manhattan Project, received a letter from Oppenheimer complimenting her efforts: “No single hour of delay has been attributed by any man in the laboratory to a malfunctioning, either in the Library or in the classified files. To this must be added the fact of the surprising success in controlling and accounting for the mass of classified information, where a single serious slip might not only have caused us the profoundest embarrassment but might have jeopardized the successful completion of our job.”
Like others in their era, the Serbers’ left-leaning politics and associations with Oppenheimer prior to the war brought them some political trouble during the Red Scare of the 1950s. They moved from California to New York City in 1951, where Robert became a professor at Columbia University and Charlotte worked as a production assistant for the Broadway Theatre. Charlotte Serber was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1965 and died on May 22, 1967.
In honor of Women’s History Month, the Los Alamos Historical Society is featuring women of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in its articles for March.