Women physicists in the National Laboratories

During World War II, almost all physicists were involved in some sort of war-related research or in teaching military officers. Some worked in small groups at universities around the country. The radar project was headquartered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the sonar project at Johns Hopkins University, while the Manhattan Engineer District oversaw work at the Manhattan Project sites; the large production facilities, however, were managed by industrial contractors (Monsanto at Clinton, TN and DuPont at Hanford, WA). With the end of World War II, leaders in the scientific community turned their attention to the question of what should be done with this enormous research infrastructure. Certainly it should not be dismantled. They also confronted the fact that many physicists engaged in military research were eager to resume their civilian careers. For example, personnel at the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago had been largely moved to positions at Clinton Laboratory or Hanford Laboratory to help with the reactor work there long before the war ended.

The individual laboratories evolved from sites of the Manhattan Project, and were managed in a variety of ways under the direction of the AEC. The model varied. For example, Brookhaven was not an original research site of the Manhattan Project, but it was established by a group of physicists who had worked on the Manhattan Project as a center for the construction of accelerators and reactors for fundamental research. Argonne consolidated the research established in the Chicago area by the Met Lab and was managed by the University of Chicago; Oak Ridge, managed by a consortium of universities, focused on the development of reactors; and Los Alamos, managed by the University of California, focused on weapons development. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, managed by the University of California, grew to provide users from industry and academia access to Lawrence's cyclotrons. It was agreed that the labs should compete with one another to ensure that their research programs were efficient economically and of high scientific quality, particularly since classified research could not be published or subjected to peer review. Edward Teller lobbied for the establishment of Livermore as a center of research on nuclear weapons to provide a check on Los Alamos's work [1].

The evolution of the National Laboratories offered a variety of opportunities for women physicists to do exciting physics and avoid the anti-nepotism rules at universities. Edith Truslow and Ralph Smith [2] grouped Manhattan Project scientists at Los Alamos into five categories, which were found at all the Manhattan Project sites:

• 1.  
  academic personnel on leave from universities and colleges;
• 2.  
  young PhDs recently arrived from graduate school;
• 3.  
  graduate students with varying experience;
• 4.  
  technicians, administrative and clerical personnel; and
• 5.  
  officers and enlisted personnel.

Most of the established scientists were eager to return to their civilian jobs, and graduate students wanted to finish their degrees. Military personnel were ordered to report to their induction points and muster out. Laboratory directors returned to their civilian positions. Although General Leslie Groves (US Army commander of the Manhattan Project during the war) remained in overall charge, the individual project sites suffered a sudden shake-up in leadership. Many laboratory staff struggled to decide whether to accept jobs offered by the Manhattan Project labs or to accept civilian positions in academia or industry. For women, the situation was often complicated by having young children and, at least in Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford, the rough housing built cheaply to accommodate wartime staff.

New PhDs were a different kettle of fish. Many of them had joined the Manhattan Project straight out of graduate school and did not have established careers to pursue. Several young married women PhDs who worked on the Manhattan Project remained in the lab system after the war along with their husbands and went on to distinguished careers.

Jane Hamilton (figure 2.1) grew up in Denver and studied at the University of Chicago, where she was awarded her PhD in physics in 1942 [3]. There she met and married David Hall, a fellow physics student. She taught for a year as an instructor at the University of Denver and in 1943 both Halls joined the Met Lab, the Manhattan Project site at the University of Chicago. In 1944, they moved to the Hanford site, where Jane was a senior supervisor for DuPont [3], assigned to work on health physics instrumentation since anti-nepotism rules did not allow her to work with her husband on reactors [4]. In 1945, Enrico Fermi, then the director of the Argonne site of the Met Lab in Chicago, brought Jane to Argonne as an associate physicist and assistant to the director [5]. That lasted only two months because David Hall had accepted a position at Los Alamos. Jane became a staff member at Los Alamos in late 1945 [3].

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At Los Alamos, she was a member of the group that designed and built the Clementine reactor, the first plutonium-fueled reactor with liquid metal coolant. It went critical in 1946 and operated until Christmas Eve 1952. Reactor operator Jane Heydorn—who arrived at Los Alamos as a member of the Women's Army Corps (WAC) and worked as a telephone operator before transferring to the electronics construction group, where she returned after her discharge—remembers that Jane Hall trained her to operate Clementine in 1949, when she became probably the first and only woman to operate a fast neutron reactor. She remembers that after training, Jane Hall handed her the key to the reactor console and said, 'Now it's all yours. Take good care of it.' When Clementine shut down, Heydorn moved to the midnight shift on the Water Boiler, another reactor fueled with weapons grade uranium [6].

Jane Hall moved up the ladder of Los Alamos administration to become Assistant Director, while conducting research on reactors, x-ray crystallography, neutron physics and cosmic radiation. In 1967, she was named a member of the AEC Committee on Nuclear Materials and Safeguards. She retired from Los Alamos in 1970, but continued to serve as a consultant [7]. She served as secretary of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC from 1956–59 and was named to the GAC itself as its first woman member in 1966 for a term to expire in 1972. On 6 October 1970, she was awarded the AEC Citation and a gold medal as the first woman to receive this award [3].

Another example of a woman who stayed in the lab system, Elizabeth (Diz) Riddle Graves, grew up in Oklahoma City and received her PhD in physics from the University of Chicago, where she married fellow graduate student Al Graves. The Graves moved to Austin, Texas but left in 1943 for Los Alamos. Although Diz Graves had studied neutron scattering for her dissertation, she could not work at the University of Texas because of anti-nepotism rules, and thus the young couple became separated, since Diz stayed in Chicago. Al Graves made it a condition of his coming to Los Alamos that his wife should also be offered employment.

After the war, the Graves family remained at Los Alamos to raise their three children. Al worked in the nuclear testing division and at the time of his death in July 1965 was division leader [8]. Diz worked in the physics division with fast neutron experiments and at the time of her death in 1972 was a group leader there [9]. She was known for her sense of humor and her indomitable devotion to her experiments. She actually went into labor while working on an experiment and continued work while timing her contractions with a stopwatch [10].

On 21 May 1946, Al Graves was in a group of seven men watching as Louis Slotin demonstrated how to push two pieces of enriched uranium or plutonium towards each other to measure the neutrons emitted as fissions were triggered by the neutrons they exchanged. By measuring the distance and heat generated in the samples, he could determine their content of fissile material. The experiment was done by pushing slugs toward one another with a screwdriver and was known to be dangerous (it was called 'tickling the dragon's tail'!).

Slotin was training the men in his techniques when his hand slipped and the room filled with a blue glow of ionization that meant a chain reaction had started. Slotin flung himself over the experiment to push the pieces of fissile material apart. He knew immediately that he had received a lethal dose of radiation. Al Graves had been at Slotin's shoulder when the accident started, and Slotin asked Diz to calculate the dose the person at his shoulder had received without telling her that it was her husband. Graves lived to die of a heart attack, but developed some symptoms of radiation poisoning, including cataracts and temporary baldness [11]. Diz also turned down an appointment to the AEC because she did not want to leave her husband and family soon after the accident [12].

Yet another well-known woman physicist, Leona Woods (figure 2.2), received her PhD in molecular spectroscopy from the University of Chicago in 1943 [13]. In 1942, Met Lab moved into the basement lab where she was working on molecular spectroscopy, and Leona was eager to join the group of intelligent young men who played as hard as they worked [14]. The group built the first nuclear reactor, a 'pile' of graphite bricks with uranium spheres embedded in them, under the football stadium of the University of Chicago. The group made history when this nuclear reactor went critical on 2 December 1942 and produced the world's first self-sustaining, controlled nuclear chain reaction. Woods was included because her skill as a glassblower enabled her to construct the neutron detectors that determined when the pile went critical.

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In July 1943, Woods married John Marshall, a physicist who had come to Chicago from Columbia, and the couple helped rebuild the pile outside Chicago in the Red Gate Woods, codenamed Argonne Woods, one of the temporary sites used by the Met Lab prior to the establishment of Argonne National Laboratory. Leona became pregnant and worked on the pile while hiding her pregnancy under overalls and a denim jacket until the baby's birth in 1944, when the Marshalls headed for the Hanford site to help with the construction and operation of the plutonium production reactors. Leona's mother moved, too, and with the help of Fermi's bodyguard, the baby was raised well [15]. At the end of the war, Leona received a 1946 Mademoiselle Merit Award along with Captain Arlene Schiedenhein, commander of the WACs on the Manhattan Project, and the USS Missouri, glamour girl of the fleet [16].

After the war, the Marshall's returned to Chicago, where she became a research associate at the Institute for Nuclear Studies of the University of Chicago in 1947. Her work with Enrico Fermi supported a gradual transition from nuclear to particle physics. Her second son was born in Chicago in 1949. When Fermi died in 1954, Leona moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, while John Marshall moved to Los Alamos. Leona then worked as a visiting scientist from 1958–60 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, before moving to New York University as an associate professor. Although she had then been promoted to full professor, she accepted an appointment as an associate professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1963. She served as a consultant to Los Alamos, TRW Space Systems Group and the Rand Corporation, which named her a staff member from 1966–70. Her interests evolved from nuclear physics to problems in fundamental particles and cosmology.

John Marshall had remained at Los Alamos during this time and in 1966 the Marshalls divorced, with Leona then marrying Willard Libby, who was on the staff at UCLA and had won a Nobel Prize in 1960 for the development of radiocarbon dating. After four years of commuting, Leona accepted positions as a visiting professor of engineering at UCLA and as a staff member at R&D Associates. In 1972, she dropped her affiliation with UCLA and worked full time with R&D Associates. Her interests shifted to problems in cosmology and climate change. She also wrote a book about her experiences in physics, The Uranium People. The quality of her work is attested by the fact that she was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Royal Geographical Society, however, her peripatetic career kept her from leadership positions, although she played important roles in many projects [14, 15, 17].

The other women physicists who worked at Argonne National Laboratory included two women born in Germany, future Nobel laureate Maria Mayer (whose work will be described in a later chapter because her most famous discoveries were made at the University of Chicago) and Luise Meyer-Schutzmeister [18–20]. Meyer-Schutzmeister was awarded a PhD by the Technical University of Berlin in 1943. While in Germany, she taught at the Technical University of Berlin, worked at the University of Gottingen and served as a group leader at the Radioisotope Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. She married German-born astrophysicist Peter Meyer, who specialized in cosmic rays, and they immigrated to the United States in 1953, going to the University of Chicago, where Peter was appointed to the faculty. Luise became a research associate at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago in 1953. In 1956 she became an associate scientist in the Physics Division of Argonne National Laboratory, and in 1973, a senior scientist. She conducted resonance absorption and fluorescence measurements of gamma rays in nuclear reactions, was a member of the team that provided the first independent confirmation of the discovery of the Mössbauer effect and was involved in elucidating the structure of nuclear giant resonances [19]. She continued her research studies at Argonne until her death in 1981. Luise and Peter had two sons [21]. Luise was recognized as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. The Luise Meyer-Schutzmeister Award, named in her honor, was created by the Association for Women in Science for graduate students in physics [18, 19].

Physicist Kay Way had been the first PhD advisee of John Wheeler, a brilliant theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina. She obtained her PhD in 1938, taking the time to co-author three papers because there were no jobs. In 1938, Way obtained a Huff Research Fellowship at Bryn Mawr College, followed by an appointment as an instructor at the University of Tennessee. By 1942, she had been promoted to assistant professor and was working on a project to build a neutron source for the production of an isotope of plutonium from ²³⁹Np. She was then recruited to the war effort to study mines and minesweeping. She heard rumors of the Manhattan Project work in Chicago, called Wheeler, and soon found herself helping Alvin Weinberg analyze neutron behavior in Fermi's atomic piles, and studying the systematics of the radioactive decay of fission products, which lead to the well-known Way–Wigner formula. In the early summer of 1945, Way moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee to work at the Clinton Laboratory of the Manhattan Project, where large experimental reactors were under construction [22]. She had been commuting between Chicago and Oak Ridge in an ancient car that she bought from a friend for 150 US dollars. Her designs supported the plutonium production reactors at Hanford, and she visited there, where she knew Jane Hall. She also visited Los Alamos, since she knew about the 'atomic bomb' project [23].

When the war ended, Way recognized that the vast amount of data on various nuclei collected during the war needed to be organized. So in December 1945, she helped run a conference at Oak Ridge to examine the problem. The conference eventually led to the formation of Oak Ridge Associated Universities, which oversaw the operation of Clinton Laboratory when it became Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 1946, she also co-edited the book, One World or None, an influential discussion of a nuclear world by many distinguished scientists, including several Nobel Laureates, among them Albert Einstein. It was about this time that the McCarthy hearings began affecting several staff members at Oak Ridge. Meanwhile, Way continued to work at Oak Ridge on organizing nuclear data, a vast and essential undertaking. In 1949, she moved to the National Bureau of Standards in Washington to work full time on the data project.

In 1953, Way led the formation of the Nuclear Data Project, for which a group of well-regarded physicists collected and organized data into the Nuclear Data Sheets, which were used by almost all nuclear experimentalists well into the 1970 s. Also in 1953, Way moved to the National Research Council and back to Oak Ridge in 1963. Throughout this period she continued her work on nuclear data. In 1954, she and Marion Wood studied the systematic trends in the half-lives of beta decaying nuclides and published a method for approximating the energy of beta decays in isotopes where it has not been measured, the first example of what became known as a Way–Wood systematic.

Way retired from Oak Ridge in 1968 and became an adjunct professor at Duke University. She was a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science [22].

Mary Langs started her university education at the University of Washington in Seattle and received a fellowship to Mills College, where she earned a master's degree in 1941. She subsequently received another fellowship to George Washington University. In 1942, she married Harold Argo, a fellow graduate student at George Washington. As professors left for war projects, she taught freshman physics. Then the Argos moved to Los Alamos, where they worked in Teller's group doing calculations in support of his project to produce a fusion bomb.

The Argos followed Teller to Chicago when he left Los Alamos in February 1946, and Harold returned to graduate study. Mary worked briefly with future Nobel laureate Maria Mayer and then started a family that would eventually grow to a daughter and three sons. The Argos lived on the top floor of the Mayers' house in Hyde Park in Chicago. In 1948, the Argos moved back to Los Alamos, and Mary Argo returned to work in 1960, doing opacity calculations until her retirement in 1984. She greatly enjoyed her work, never stopped learning and stayed in touch with Edward Teller, with whom she collaborated on several projects. Her husband boasted that he never had to explain anything to her [24].

In many ways, Mary Argo's career path was typical of those of younger women who came to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project. For example, Margaret Ramsey came to Los Alamos in the spring of 1945 after completing her bachelor's degree at the University of Rochester, doing calculations in astrophysics under the direction of Robert Marshak. In 1946, she left Los Alamos and studied for a year at Indiana University before getting married in 1947 and moving to Cornell to the complete coursework for her master's degree from Indiana University. For the next few years, she worked as a teaching assistant and a research assistant on the photographic emulsions used to record nuclear events at the Cornell synchrotron and at Caltech. At that point, she decided to drop out of physics [25].

The stories of Margaret Ramsey and Mary Argo illustrate the exodus of scientists, both men and women, from the Manhattan Project labs. The labs in turn recruited new scientists, including several women physicists. The four stories told below illustrate the variety of women who took jobs at the labs after the war, and how they balanced their work and their personal lives.

Judy Gursky (figure 2.3) graduated with a BA in physics from Mt Holyoke College in 1947 and visited the office of the American Physical Society in New York City because she had heard that they kept a card file of open jobs. Judy joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory when she was 20 and worked in the physics division on materials used for shielding, although she was more interested in nuclear level schemes. She then transferred to the electronics group, where she had a phenomenal boss, P R Bell, with whom she spent three years developing and testing materials made for scintillation counters, which also gave her the opportunity to work on nuclear level schemes as a way of testing the detectors. She was of particular value to the group: most male members of the group were color blind and could not read the codes on resistors [26].

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Judy then entered graduate school in physics at Vanderbilt University, where she completed the course work for a PhD and met a fellow graduate student, Martin Gursky, who was a theorist and had just finished his qualifying exams. Martin was intrigued by the new female graduate student and introduced himself by sticking his head into her office and asking, 'Do you like chamber music?' Judy and Martin were married in 1953 and soon had their first child. Martin had to get a job while he finished up his PhD. He went to Los Alamos accompanied by Judy and their child. Judy completed her MS in 1954 and Martin completed his PhD in 1958 [26].

By 1955, the couple had a two-year-old son and a baby of eight months, but Judy went back to work at Los Alamos. She was probably the first staff member hired part time. She worked with the electronics group using radioactive lanthanum to look at changes in density during an explosion. After a year, Judy transferred to P (physics) Division, thinking that she would be working on nuclear decay schemes. However, she was put to work making targets for the lab's Van de Graaff accelerator and the cyclotron, a critical skill in accelerator studies of nuclear properties. Judy was good at it! The Gurskys had five children in eight years, and Judy remained half time until all the children were in school, at which juncture she was hired full time and continued making isotopically enriched targets for multiple groups, including a number of visiting faculty members, such as physicist Fay Ajzenberg-Selove. Judy helped form a group of target makers from around the world who met to discuss techniques [26].

At Los Alamos, Judy Gursky worked alone, even declining a technician when she was offered one. She had much useful consultation with the materials division. She made targets from at least two-thirds of the elements, including all of the isotopes of lead and platinum. She remembers carrying finished targets from her lab to the accelerators in a box on her bicycle, since that was the fastest way to get them from one place to another. In 1983, Judy retired although she worked as a consultant until 1993 when the Van de Graaff accelerator was shut down [26].

Like Gursky, Elizabeth ('Beth') Hebb graduated from a women's college, Bryn Mawr, with a BA cum laude and with honors, in 1950. She then moved to Indiana University, where she obtained her master's and PhD degrees in physics. She also met her husband, Eugene Plassman, at Indiana University. He had fought in World War II, then completed his undergraduate work at Hastings College in Nebraska, and was working on his graduate degrees in physics at Indiana University. He had visited Los Alamos as a summer student in 1953 and returned there in 1955 as a staff member after a short stint at the University of Kentucky [27].

Beth moved to Bradley University in Peoria until her marriage to Eugene in 1955, at which time she moved to Los Alamos, where she worked on materials for weapons development. In 1960, she was appointed assistant group leader, in 1970, a group leader, and in 1981, an assistant division leader. In 1982, she was named Associate Division Leader for Weapons Systems and in 1983 she also became the Program Manager for Production and Surveillance. She retired in 1991 as the Design Engineering Leader (also for weapons). At the lab, she was a member and chair of the Staff Review Committee and the Nuclear Criticality Safety Committee. She belonged to the American Physical Society and the American Nuclear Society [28].

Her technical work on weapons development is classified. As an administrator, she was in charge of managing groups of scientists and technicians, most of whom were men. She recalled only one instance in her first year at Los Alamos where being a woman made a difference. When merit raises were to be announced, Eugene's group leader called her group leader to make sure that her raise would not be larger than his and cause bad feelings at home. She also fondly recalled that when she was expecting her first child, the men in her group boiled water every morning without any idea what role it would play in delivering a baby, but knowing that it was traditional and feeling they owed it to her. One of them reports that they drank a lot of instant coffee on those mornings. Beth left work two days before the birth of her son, although she worked until the last minute before the births of her other three children, two daughters and another son. She sometimes worked half or three quarters time if the home situation demanded it, but usually worked full time as a physicist and held another full-time job as a mother. She was well-liked, enjoyed swimming and hiking, and was active in the community [29]. As one woman who worked with her said, she was ahead of her time.

Gertrude ('Trude') Scharff Goldhaber arrived at the newly created Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1950—as the first woman PhD hired by that lab—at an older age and by a more devious path than those followed by Gursky and Plassman. By the time of her death in 1998, she was a senior scientist at Brookhaven, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was also a co-founder of Brookhaven Women in Science [30].

Trude completed her doctoral degree in Munich in 1935 with Walther Gerlach. Her research concerned the way that stress affects magnetization in ferromagnetic materials above the Curie temperature. She realized then that she needed to leave Germany, so she fled to London, where she had difficulty finding a position, in part due to the flood of refugees. After living on the proceeds of the sale of her camera for six months and working as a translator, she finally accepted a postdoctoral position with G P Thompson, working on electron diffraction. It was made very clear that she would not receive a permanent position, so she searched for another job until she married Maurice Goldhaber, a young American physicist whom she had met while he was studying in Berlin. Maurice had a job on the faculty at the University of Illinois, so the couple moved to Urbana, where their two sons, both of whom became theoretical physicists, were born [31–33].

The University of Illinois had strict anti-nepotism rules and refused to hire Trude in spite of her excellent credentials; nor could she be given a laboratory, so she had to either quit physics or join in her husband's research, without a salary. This she did, and managed to discover that neutrons were emitted in spontaneous fission as well as in neutron-induced fission; however, the paper could not be published until after the war. The Goldhabers would spend 11 years in Urbana, during which time Trude would have no regular job, although after the war, she was appointed a research assistant professor. The Goldhabers observed beta rays impinging on lead atoms and rigorously demonstrated that the beta rays were indistinguishable from electrons [31].

In 1950, the Goldhabers both accepted staff positions at Brookhaven National Laboratory. There Trude worked on the collective excited nuclear states at low energies, verifying the variable moment of inertia model by comparing the energies of the first two excited states in several regions of the nuclear mass spectrum. She is remembered for developing graphs to explain her results. She even managed to publish a paper with her son Alfred, possibly the first paper published in physics by a mother/son team [31, 32]. The importance of her cumulative work is evidenced by the many honors she received, notably her election to the National Academy of Sciences.

Another recruit to the National Laboratories, in this case to Los Alamos, was Alice Hall Armstrong, known widely as Miss A. After Armstrong's graduation from Wellesley College in 1919 with a degree in physics, she took a job with the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Washington, D C. The NBS certified the amount of radium in sources used for cancer treatment in the US, and she thought the work would be interesting. She worked as a laboratory assistant for about a year, checking radium dial wristwatches for use by the army, and was then able to transfer to the radium section as an assistant physicist [34]. She said that there were quite a number (half a dozen) of women working at NBS at that time. She often worked late when an unusually large shipment of radium came in. The female technician with whom she worked and who had graduated from Bryn Mawr, Frieda Kenyon, was used to guns, so she brought one in and planned to fire it twice out of the window of the lab to alert the gatekeeper to call the police if needed. They never had to fire the gun, but it made them much happier to have it [35].

The instrumentation they used to measure the radium in samples was a gold-leaf electroscope, which they could charge and then discharge through ionizing the air around it by bringing the radium sample to be tested close. They measured the time it took to discharge the electroscope and compared it to the time it took a standard source, made by Marie Curie, to discharge it. The standard was a small amount of radium barium sulfate in a sealed glass capsule. The German standard had exploded because of the buildup of radon gas, and one night when Armstrong was holding the US standard in forceps, she either dropped it or it exploded. She notified the chief of division immediately, terrified that she had destroyed the national standard. She was given a sheet of brown paper and sent home to shake herself off, undress, wrap all her clothes in the paper and bring them back to the bureau to salvage the precious radium. This happened in 1922 after Curie's visit in 1921, when Armstrong actually met her [35].

Armstrong left NBS in 1922 and enrolled in graduate study at Radcliffe in order to get a master's degree and earn more money. The problem with physics courses was that many of them were offered at Harvard, and at that time women were strictly barred from Harvard undergraduate classrooms, and even at the graduate level some professors banned women from their courses. The department chair at the time did not want women in 'the sacred halls of Harvard' and Armstrong had to sneak past his office to enter the building. She recalls turning 'into a little gray mouse' if he came out of his office [35]. She survived the various hassles, obtained her master's degree in 1923 from Radcliffe and went to work with William Duane and his group [36, 37].

Duane's group bought x-ray tubes unevacuated with the electrodes set in the ends. They put one on a stand and attached it to a vacuum pump by means of a tube that entered the x-ray tube through a hole in one end. The students stood in a lead-lined chamber and looked through lead glass as they gradually raised the voltage until they saw a flash that indicated remaining air. They repeated the procedure until they got the voltage high enough to produce x-rays. The back of the tube was unshielded and held against the wall. When the tube was evacuated enough to produce x-rays, they would call a glass-blower to seal it. After several successful constructions, they had an accident that gave Armstrong half a lethal dose of x-radiation. She stopped menstruating, lost all energy and had to go home for a year and a half. Finally, she began to recover her strength. She said she was the one doing 'menial' work near the tubes and so got the high dose of radiation [35]. Apparently she had stepped outside the lead-lined room to make an adjustment.

For the academic year 1925/6, Armstrong worked as a part-time instructor at Wellesley. She was also awarded a fellowship of $1500 US dollars from Radcliffe. From 1927–29, she worked as a research assistant in biophysics at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. In 1929, she returned to research on x-rays at Harvard while working as a laboratory assistant for the Harvard Cancer Commission at Huntington Hospital in Boston, and received her PhD from Radcliffe in 1930 [34]. Harvard counted the work she had done before the accident towards her degree [35].

In the fall of 1930, Armstrong returned to Wellesley as an assistant professor of physics and was promoted to associate professor in 1936. Her experimental work is documented in a number of publications [34]. In 1939/40, she took a leave from Wellesley to study at the acoustical laboratory at UCLA, and from February 1944 to August 1945 she worked on a war project as a special research associate at the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory [38]. She mostly made routine measurements, since women were not allowed on the research boat on Massachusetts Bay because there was no women's lavatory [35]. In 1945, she became the Louise S McDowall Professor at Wellesley and served as department chair from 1945–50.

In 1950, Armstrong was looking for a sabbatical where she could conduct research. Los Alamos was looking for a woman physicist to supervise the work of a group of women who were reading photographic plates covered with a special emulsion that was used as a detector for nuclear reactions. After a year in Los Alamos, she returned to Wellesley in 1952 so that another faculty member could take a sabbatical, even though she had been offered a permanent position at Los Alamos. In June 1953, she resigned from Wellesley to become a permanent staff member at Los Alamos [34, 35]. She was appointed Assistant Group Leader in the Physics Division of Los Alamos in 1957 [39]. She worked on nuclear data analysis until a few years before her retirement in 1964, when she moved to the Vela Satellite Program, studying the distribution of charged particles in the Van Allen belt. Armstrong gave the first paper presented at the American Physical Society on the flux and energy of protons in the lower Van Allen belt [37].

One of the principal developers of the use of layers of emulsions to detect and characterize nuclear particles was the Austrian physicist, Marietta Blau, who studied techniques for the preparation of uniform thick layers of silver bromide that could be used to detect cosmic ray tracks in the 1930s. She also perfected darkroom techniques for the development of the thick emulsions, demonstrated that proton tracks in the emulsions can be distinguished from alpha particle tracks and showed that the proton recoils produced by elastic collisions with neutrons can be detected by the emulsions.

During World War II, emulsions continued to be used primarily in cosmic ray research and were not more widely used because they were not adequately sensitive to the ionization along the tracks of medium energy charged particles produced in accelerators. During the late 1940s and the 1950s, the range of materials used in emulsions increased, and their versatility in the detection of radiation was further extended. In particular, in 1948 H R Berriman announced that he had prepared a photographic emulsion that was more sensitive to ionization, and layered emulsions became the state of the art detection system for nuclear particles at major accelerators, enabling a number of major discoveries to be made in particle physics [40, 41].

Blau's personal life was a story of tragedy. In Vienna, she worked on physics as a volunteer at the Institute for Radium Research and the Physical Institute of the University, having left a paid position in Germany to return to look after her sick mother. Some time around 1931, Blau accepted Hertha Wambacher as a collaborator, even though Wambacher was a member of the Nazi party and had studied law and not physics. They collaborated for nearly a decade, until the Nazi impact on Austria began to be felt. Another member of the Nazi party from the same research group, G Stetter, a married bigwig, was having an affair with Wambacher. Fortunately, when Hitler annexed Austria, Blau, a Jew, was conducting research in Oslo, and was able to escape to Mexico. She worked there during the war, even though her research plans had been stolen during a stop in Hamburg, and the research projects proposed in them were implemented by Stetter and Wambacher.

In 1944, Marietta Blau was able to move to the US, where she joined Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1950. Subsequently, in 1955, she moved to the University of Miami, Coral Gables. Cataracts arising from her work with radiation, nearly blinded her, and she was forced to stop work and return to Austria in 1960 for surgery which she could not afford in the United States. The surgery was eventually successful, but Blau struggled with poverty, living on her American Social Security pension since she was not eligible for Austrian support because she had never had worked there for a salary. She died in Vienna in 1970 [40].

Nuclear emulsions were widely used after the end of World War II. One of the authors (CH) remembers having a summer job during college developing nuclear emulsions at MIT. Phyllis Stcyr Freier used the technique to detect heavy nuclei in cosmic radiation during her graduate studies at the University of Minnesota in April 1948, and her analysis of the emulsions led to her PhD thesis in 1950. Her husband, whom she had met in graduate school, was awarded a faculty position at the University. Anti-nepotism rules prevented Phyllis from any formal position at the university or from teaching at either the graduate or undergraduate level. She could not hold research grants. Nevertheless, she continued her work with cosmic rays, studies of solar flares and gamma ray astronomy mostly, with large, often international collaborations. She was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as chair of the Cosmic Physics Division, the Nominating Committee and the Council of the APS, while finding time to raise two children [42].

Unlike her older sister-in-law, Gertrude Goldhaber, Sulamith Goldhaber met her husband, Gerson Goldhaber, the younger brother of Maurice Goldhaber (Trude's husband), when they were both working towards their master's degrees at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Sulamith had been born in Vienna and was brought to Israel, where she grew up as a child. Gerson and Sulamith both received their degrees in 1947, he in physics and she in physical chemistry. The young couple married before moving to the University of Wisconsin. There Gerson received his PhD in physics in 1950, and Sulamith received her PhD in radiochemistry in 1951. Gerson received a junior faculty appointment at Columbia working on the cyclotron and Sulamith joined him there as a research associate in radiochemistry until 1953. At this period of her life, Sulamith changed her field of interest from radiochemistry to particle physics. She and her husband became experts in using nuclear emulsions to identify particles produced in nuclear reactions by both accelerators and cosmic rays [43].

In 1953, Gerson became an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley and in 1954, Sulamith became a research physicist at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). In 1958, she received a promotion to become a physicist (a staff member) at the Laboratory [44]. During these years, the Goldhabers established a laboratory and trained teams of scanners and measurers to work on the emulsions. They planned to use the emulsions to collect data from interactions produced on the Bevatron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, then the world's most powerful accelerator. According to Lawrence Berkeley physicist, Luis Alvarez, one of the Goldhabers always seemed to be in a corner of the Bevatron control room, hoping for a brief exposure for their emulsions. In 1956, Sulamith presented a talk at the Rochester conference, mostly on her own work, which marked an important transition for the discovery of new particles and for those who measured their properties. Previously, such work had been most effectively conducted with cosmic rays. The Goldhabers made use of high-energy accelerators, which were the state of the art. Sulamith published 25 papers, many of them groundbreaking, on her work at the Bevatron, with several collaborators, including but not limited to her husband [43].

By the early 1960s, it became clear that the hydrogen bubble chamber would replace nuclear emulsions as the detector of choice for studies of particles at high-energy accelerators, and Sulamith learned how to use bubble chambers with her usual enthusiasm and energy and quickly became an acknowledged expert. She and Gerson obtained sabbaticals and in the fall of 1965 began a trip around the world to give lectures at various labs and meet the scientists there. In Madras, Sulamith collapsed with an inoperable brain tumor and died suddenly and unexpectedly [43].

The microscopists at the labs and other facilities who analyzed nuclear emulsions were often married to other laboratory employees and were usually women; they were thus similar to the well-known women 'computers' of the Manhattan Project, a group of women who worked with Marchant and Friden electromechanical desk calculators to model the shock waves produced by the shaped charges that compressed the core of a plutonium bomb.

The emulsions were mixed in the laboratory, spread uniformly onto glass plates and dried there. They were then stacked, and the stacks were exposed to beams from accelerators or cosmic rays. In the microscopy laboratory the bundles were disassembled and individual plates were developed carefully. The microscopist mounted a plate in her microscope so that its position was reproducible, and she could make measurements in thousandths of an inch using scales built into the scope. She lowered the objective of the microscope into oil and carefully moved the plate so that it could be scanned. Her normal duty was to count the number of tracks that had entered the prescribed area. Occasionally, the job was to identify a track and measure its length and the angle at which it entered the emulsion, which was much more painstaking [45].

In many ways, Dorothy Smith (figure 2.4) was typical of the women microscopists at the labs. She arrived at Los Alamos in 1949 with her husband Milo, a machinist who had accepted a one-year assignment there, and her three children. When the youngest entered school in 1953, she was recruited to the emulsions group by a close woman friend, Rexine Booth, whom she had met on her first day in Los Alamos when the three-year-old Smith boy spotted the three-year-old Booth girl watching him from her window. Dorothy Smith was trained in a class of ten women, five in the morning, five in the afternoon. She did well and was assigned a special British microscope whose controls operated essentially backwards from the American models. She was also asked to help with mixing emulsions. Her work was always careful. She remembers noticing that the emulsions were being mixed wrongly. Her tact is evidenced by her question to her supervisor, 'Either I'm not understanding this process, or you're adding ten times too much—'. She was indeed right and they had to throw out 15 gallons that had already been mixed [45].

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Thus women physicists arrived in the National Laboratatories by many paths and did a variety of work there. They benefitted from the nearly unlimited funding provided to the labs during the postwar period and the onset of the Cold War. In many cases, the labs provided an environment where married couples could both pursue careers, a stark contrast to the research universities. The next chapter will discuss the careers of women physicists in the research universities, and the role of anti-nepotism rules in their lives will be easily apparent. The National Laboratories frequently benefitted from their ability to recruit and retain married couples.