Manhattan Project Insignia. Courtesy/Atomic Heritage Foundation
Staff Report
Voices of the Manhattan Project is a joint project by the Atomic Heritage Foundation and the Los Alamos Historical Society to create a public archive of our oral history collections of Manhattan Project veterans and their families.
The Manhattan Project was a great human collaboration with 130,000 people around the country working on the top-secret project.
A list of the available Los Alamos Oral Interviews available today on the website (more will be added):
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Arno Roensch, a glass blower in the Army, worked at Los Alamos.
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Eleanor Roensch worked as a telephone operator in Los Alamos.
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Kay Manley’s husband was personally called by Leo Szilard and asked to move from the Met Lab at Chicago to Los Alamos. She herself worked on calculations at Los Alamos.
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Felix DePaula talks about his role as “garbage man” at Los Alamos and witnessing the Trinity test.
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Jay Wechsler, who enlisted in the Army in 1943 and spent several months at Oak Ridge working as an Army construction engineer, was suddenly transferred to Los Alamos in the winter of ‘43 where he began working directly with Otto Frisch. Wechsler helped Frisch work on a large fission chamber that Frisch had originally designed in Denmark and later shipped to the United States.
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George Cowan joined the Manhattan Project in 1942 at the Met Lab as a chemist for Enrico Fermi’s group, and also worked for Columbia University.
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Ben Diven discusses helping set up Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project and working on instrumentation for the atomic bomb.
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Becky Diven began her work for the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944, where she developed a quartz fiber microbalance to weigh extremely small amounts of plutonium.
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Jack Aeby discusses working with Emilio Segrè at Los Alamos, and being the only person to capture a color photograph of the Trinity atomic bomb test.
To hear these and many more oral histories, click HERE to view the Voices of the Manhattan Project website.
