- BS Electrical Engineering 1943
Michigan Tech alumnus and faculty emeritus Walter Anderson brings World War II into the high school classroom, telling his personal stories about the development of the atomic bomb code-named "Little Boy."
The Manhattan Project was cloaked in secrecy, hidden even from most of the scientists involved. But Walter Anderson and other curious engineers at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, calculated that the mysterious substance they were producing was the rare isotope uranium 235. A few years later, U-235 from Oak Ridge would fuel the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Their equations, scribbled on paper, are seen on the cover.
For the gregarious Walter Anderson '43, the hardest part about working on the Manhattan Project - America's gargantuan, covert effort to build the atomic bomb - was keeping quiet about it.
"The most we could say was, 'Yeah, I was at Los Alamos, yeah, I was at Oak Ridge,'" says the retired Michigan Tech emeritus professor.
While they didn't talk about it much, over the years it became clear that as many as thirty University alumni and faculty had worked on the bomb.
"Michigan Tech was represented on the Manhattan Project entirely out of proportion to its size," says Anderson. "Back then, we only had about nine hundred students." read more at http://www.admin.mtu.edu/urel/magazine/spring07/manhattan.html
Excerpted from Michigan Tech Magazine, Spring 2007
The Manhattan Project was cloaked in secrecy, hidden even from most of the scientists involved. But Walter Anderson and other curious engineers at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, calculated that the mysterious substance they were producing was the rare isotope uranium 235. A few years later, U-235 from Oak Ridge would fuel the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Their equations, scribbled on paper, are seen on the cover.
For the gregarious Walter Anderson '43, the hardest part about working on the Manhattan Project - America's gargantuan, covert effort to build the atomic bomb - was keeping quiet about it.
"The most we could say was, 'Yeah, I was at Los Alamos, yeah, I was at Oak Ridge,'" says the retired Michigan Tech emeritus professor.
While they didn't talk about it much, over the years it became clear that as many as thirty University alumni and faculty had worked on the bomb.
"Michigan Tech was represented on the Manhattan Project entirely out of proportion to its size," says Anderson. "Back then, we only had about nine hundred students." read more at http://www.admin.mtu.edu/urel/magazine/spring07/manhattan.html
Excerpted from Michigan Tech Magazine, Spring 2007