WEBVTT
00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:14.480
There's a rented cabin near the water at the east end of Long Island.
00:00:14.720 --> 00:00:19.359
Two men have driven out from Manhattan to find a physicist on his summer holiday.
00:00:19.519 --> 00:00:26.160
They bring no equipment and no experiment, only a draft letter, and the hope that he will lend it his name.
00:00:26.399 --> 00:00:29.199
The letter warns a government about uranium.
00:00:29.359 --> 00:00:33.280
None of them yet knows whether the thing it describes can be built.
00:00:33.600 --> 00:00:36.159
Welcome to Same Day Difference Century.
00:00:36.320 --> 00:00:37.119
I'm Zach.
00:00:37.280 --> 00:00:39.280
Today is August 2nd.
00:00:39.600 --> 00:00:43.039
The problem began in Berlin, seven months earlier.
00:00:43.280 --> 00:00:57.039
In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann bombarded uranium with neutrons and found barium in the residue, an element roughly half of uranium's weight, where they had expected something heavier.
00:00:57.200 --> 00:01:00.399
They published the result without being able to explain it.
00:01:00.719 --> 00:01:05.599
Hahn's collaborator of three decades, Lise Meitner, was in Sweden.
00:01:05.840 --> 00:01:08.079
She had fled Germany that July.
00:01:08.239 --> 00:01:16.000
Her Austrian passport had shielded her from the racial laws until Hitler annexed Austria and took the passport's protection with it.
00:01:16.239 --> 00:01:20.719
Over Christmas, working with her nephew Otto Frisch, she did the work.
00:01:20.959 --> 00:01:25.439
The nucleus had split in two, and the missing mass had left as energy.
00:01:25.599 --> 00:01:29.519
Frisch gave it a name borrowed from biology, Fission.
00:01:29.760 --> 00:01:34.640
Niels Bohr carried the news across the Atlantic in January 1939.
00:01:35.200 --> 00:01:43.040
American laboratories confirmed the splitting within weeks, but a splitting nucleus by itself is a laboratory curiosity.
00:01:43.280 --> 00:01:45.280
The question that mattered was different.
00:01:45.439 --> 00:01:48.000
Does fission throw off spare neutrons?
00:01:48.159 --> 00:01:51.920
Enough of them to split further nuclei and keep going?
00:01:52.239 --> 00:01:55.439
One man had been waiting six years for that question.
00:01:55.680 --> 00:02:12.080
Leo Silard, a Hungarian physicist then living in New York, had conceived of a neutron chain reaction in London in 1933, standing at a traffic light after reading a newspaper account of Ernest Rutherford dismissing atomic power as moonshine.
00:02:12.319 --> 00:02:22.159
He filed for a patent on it in 1934 and assigned the patent to the British Admiralty in 1936, specifically to keep it out of open literature.
00:02:22.479 --> 00:02:34.479
In early March 1939 at Columbia University, Solard and Walter Zinn watched an oscilloscope screen register the flashes of secondary neutrons coming off fissioning uranium.
00:02:34.719 --> 00:02:41.199
Solard later recalled that after they switched the equipment off, he had little doubt the world was headed for grief.
00:02:41.439 --> 00:02:46.159
His first response was not to warn anyone, it was to stop publishing.
00:02:46.400 --> 00:02:54.560
Through the spring, he pressed physicists in the United States, Britain, and France to withhold their chain reaction results voluntarily.
00:02:54.800 --> 00:03:00.159
The Paris group under Frederick Zolio-Curie declined and published in April.
00:03:00.400 --> 00:03:08.639
The approximate number of neutrons released per fission was now printed, available on any physics library shelf, including in Germany.
00:03:08.879 --> 00:03:11.199
And Germany had reasons to be reading.
00:03:11.439 --> 00:03:15.599
In March, German forces had taken the remainder of Czechoslovakia.
00:03:15.759 --> 00:03:24.080
The uranium mines at Johakimstall, the best known deposit in Europe, had already been there since the Sudetenland was handed over the autumn before.
00:03:24.319 --> 00:03:28.159
That spring, Berlin halted uranium sales from the mines.
00:03:28.319 --> 00:03:32.639
German physicists began meeting on the uranium question that same spring.
00:03:32.879 --> 00:03:35.919
What Solard lacked was any way to act on it.
00:03:36.159 --> 00:03:43.599
He was a refugee on a temporary appointment, with no laboratory, no funding, and no line to Washington.
00:03:43.840 --> 00:03:47.199
What he had instead was a friend somewhere on Long Island.
00:03:47.439 --> 00:03:54.960
In mid-July, Solard and Eugene Wigner drove out to Peconic, where Albert Einstein was renting a cabin for the summer.
00:03:55.280 --> 00:03:57.599
Silard explained the chain reaction.
00:03:57.840 --> 00:04:02.400
By Solard's account, Einstein said he had simply never thought of that.
00:04:02.639 --> 00:04:06.719
That detail matters, because it defines what Einstein contributed.
00:04:06.879 --> 00:04:15.120
His own work on mass and energy sat underneath Vision's arithmetic, but he had not followed the neutron experiments and had no part in them.
00:04:15.280 --> 00:04:17.439
He was not being asked for physics.
00:04:17.600 --> 00:04:21.519
He was being asked for a name that a head of state would not put down on red.
00:04:22.079 --> 00:04:36.639
Solard's target was not Roosevelt, it was Belgium, because the richest uranium ore then known lay in the Belgian Congo, worked by a Belgian mining company, and Einstein was personally acquainted with the Belgian Queen Mother Elizabeth.
00:04:36.879 --> 00:04:42.560
Einstein preferred to write to the Belgian ambassador, a friend, rather than to the Queen Mother.
00:04:42.720 --> 00:04:44.560
Wigner raised an objection.
00:04:44.879 --> 00:04:49.519
Private citizens should not approach a foreign government without telling the State Department.
00:04:49.759 --> 00:04:52.319
So a covering note to Washington was added.
00:04:52.560 --> 00:05:03.600
Alexander Sachs, an economist at Lehman Corporation with access to the White House, told Silard to aim higher, and offered to put a letter into Franklin Roosevelt's hands himself.
00:05:03.839 --> 00:05:11.600
In the last days of July, Silard went back to Peconic with Edward Teller, later to be named the father of the hydrogen bomb.
00:05:11.839 --> 00:05:14.319
Einstein dictated a draft in German.
00:05:14.560 --> 00:05:21.439
Silard took it to Columbia University and worked it into two English versions, one longer and one shorter.
00:05:21.600 --> 00:05:25.920
Then he mailed both to the cabin so that Einstein could choose between them.
00:05:26.160 --> 00:05:30.720
The date typed on that page is August 2, 1939.
00:05:30.959 --> 00:05:34.720
Accounts differ on precisely when Einstein put pen to it.
00:05:34.879 --> 00:05:40.000
What is certain is that he signed both versions and sent back word that he preferred the longer.
00:05:40.240 --> 00:05:43.120
The document itself is short and unexcited.
00:05:43.519 --> 00:05:55.040
It opens by crediting recent work by Enrico Fermi and Silard, communicated in manuscript, which suggested uranium might become an important new source of energy in the immediate future.
00:05:55.279 --> 00:06:04.879
It states that a chain reaction in a large mass of uranium appears conceivable, and that this would make possible extremely powerful bombs of a new type.
00:06:05.040 --> 00:06:10.160
The phrase atomic bomb never appears in the letter, neither does any promise.
00:06:10.399 --> 00:06:22.879
A single such bomb, the letter says, carried by boat and detonated in a port, might destroy the whole port and some surrounding territory, and might well prove too heavy to be carried by aircraft.
00:06:23.120 --> 00:06:25.199
That hedge is not timidity.
00:06:25.360 --> 00:06:29.120
It's an accurate description of what was known in 1939.
00:06:29.360 --> 00:06:31.839
Nobody had calculated a critical mass.
00:06:32.160 --> 00:06:40.399
Serious estimates ran to tons of material, which is why a boat, rather than a bomber, is the delivery method the letter imagines.
00:06:40.800 --> 00:06:43.040
Then the letter turns to supply.
00:06:43.279 --> 00:06:45.199
American ores are poor.
00:06:45.519 --> 00:06:51.680
Canada and the former Czechoslovakia have better, and the most important source is the Belgian Congo.
00:06:52.079 --> 00:07:04.480
And then it proposes that the administration designate someone to maintain permanent contact with the physicists working on chain reactions, to help secure a uranium supply, and to speed up experimental work.
00:07:04.639 --> 00:07:10.480
Possibly with funds contributed by private individuals and the cooperation of industrial laboratories.
00:07:10.720 --> 00:07:17.120
The final paragraph notes that Germany has stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines it took over.
00:07:17.279 --> 00:07:27.759
And the son of the German state secretary, von Weitsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where some of the American uranium work is being repeated.
00:07:28.079 --> 00:07:29.279
That was correct.
00:07:29.600 --> 00:07:35.040
Karl Friedrich von Weitsäcker was in fact working on the German uranium effort.
00:07:35.360 --> 00:07:46.000
Einstein signed as a man who had been an outspoken pacifist for two decades and had publicly qualified that position in 1933, with respect to Germany specifically.
00:07:46.240 --> 00:07:53.920
By 1939, he was in exile with confiscated property, and by widespread report, a price on his head.
00:07:54.160 --> 00:07:57.519
He was reasoning from what was available in 1939.
00:07:57.839 --> 00:08:02.720
Germany had the physicists, held the ore, and had made the discovery first.
00:08:02.959 --> 00:08:08.160
Records recovered after the war showed the German program never came close to a weapon.
00:08:08.399 --> 00:08:14.160
The letter's difficulty turned out not to be what it said, but rather how long it took to be read.
00:08:14.399 --> 00:08:24.480
Sachs held it for weeks, waiting to deliver it in person and catch a president whose attention was elsewhere, because on September 1st, Germany invaded Poland.
00:08:24.800 --> 00:08:30.319
Sachs finally saw Roosevelt on October 11th, more than two months after the date on the letter.
00:08:30.480 --> 00:08:43.120
By Saxe's own later testimony, it took him two sittings with Roosevelt, but by the end of the second, Roosevelt had cut through to the point himself that what Sax wanted was to keep the Nazis from blowing them up.
00:08:43.360 --> 00:08:46.399
He then told his aide the matter required action.
00:08:46.639 --> 00:08:56.240
The action was an advisory committee on uranium under Lyman Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards, which first met on October 21st.
00:08:56.559 --> 00:08:59.519
Salard, Wigner, and Teller attended.
00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:05.679
Its opening recommendation was$6,000 for graphite and uranium oxide.
00:09:05.919 --> 00:09:08.399
The money took months to actually arrive.
00:09:08.639 --> 00:09:10.399
Then, very little happened.
00:09:10.639 --> 00:09:17.279
Briggs' committee was cautious and compartmented, and American work stayed at bench scale through 1940.
00:09:17.600 --> 00:09:19.759
What broke the stall was British.
00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:31.360
In July 1941, the Maud Committee concluded that a bomb could be built from a critical mass measured in kilograms rather than tons, and could plausibly be finished during the war.
00:09:31.519 --> 00:09:39.039
That finding reached Roosevelt in October 1941, and by the following January had become an industrial program.
00:09:39.440 --> 00:09:43.279
Historians divide on what the letter therefore accomplished.
00:09:43.519 --> 00:09:46.159
One reading treats it as the origin point.
00:09:46.320 --> 00:09:50.080
It created the first federal body and the first federal dollars.
00:09:50.320 --> 00:10:02.000
Another holds that the committee it produced was so slow and so underfunded that it slowed work as much as it advanced it, and that the decisive push came from Britain and would have come regardless.
00:10:02.320 --> 00:10:12.159
Edgar Sanze, who ran the Belgian mining company that worked the Congo deposits, had been privately warned in 1939 about what uranium might become.
00:10:12.480 --> 00:10:19.759
In late 1940, he shipped more than a thousand tons of exceptionally rich ore to a warehouse on Staten Island.
00:10:19.919 --> 00:10:31.840
It sat there for nearly two years, while Sanjay tried and failed to make anyone care, until an army colonel finally came to see him in September 1942 and bought the entire stock.
00:10:32.159 --> 00:10:38.879
Sanjay is credited with giving the American government much of the uranium necessary for the Manhattan Project.
00:10:39.200 --> 00:10:41.600
Einstein never worked on the bomb.
00:10:41.840 --> 00:10:43.840
The army declined to clear him.
00:10:44.080 --> 00:10:48.000
His wartime consulting was minor work for the Navy on ordinance.
00:10:48.240 --> 00:10:56.960
In 1954, Linus Pauling recorded in his diary that Einstein told him signing that letter was the one great mistake of his life.
00:10:57.919 --> 00:10:59.840
That same day, different century.
00:11:00.080 --> 00:11:00.879
I'm Zach.
00:11:01.039 --> 00:11:03.919
We'll be back tomorrow with another date, another story.
00:11:04.080 --> 00:11:05.600
Thanks for listening.
00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:14.480
There's a rented cabin near the water at the east end of Long Island.
00:00:14.720 --> 00:00:19.359
Two men have driven out from Manhattan to find a physicist on his summer holiday.
00:00:19.519 --> 00:00:26.160
They bring no equipment and no experiment, only a draft letter, and the hope that he will lend it his name.
00:00:26.399 --> 00:00:29.199
The letter warns a government about uranium.
00:00:29.359 --> 00:00:33.280
None of them yet knows whether the thing it describes can be built.
00:00:33.600 --> 00:00:36.159
Welcome to Same Day Difference Century.
00:00:36.320 --> 00:00:37.119
I'm Zach.
00:00:37.280 --> 00:00:39.280
Today is August 2nd.
00:00:39.600 --> 00:00:43.039
The problem began in Berlin, seven months earlier.
00:00:43.280 --> 00:00:57.039
In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann bombarded uranium with neutrons and found barium in the residue, an element roughly half of uranium's weight, where they had expected something heavier.
00:00:57.200 --> 00:01:00.399
They published the result without being able to explain it.
00:01:00.719 --> 00:01:05.599
Hahn's collaborator of three decades, Lise Meitner, was in Sweden.
00:01:05.840 --> 00:01:08.079
She had fled Germany that July.
00:01:08.239 --> 00:01:16.000
Her Austrian passport had shielded her from the racial laws until Hitler annexed Austria and took the passport's protection with it.
00:01:16.239 --> 00:01:20.719
Over Christmas, working with her nephew Otto Frisch, she did the work.
00:01:20.959 --> 00:01:25.439
The nucleus had split in two, and the missing mass had left as energy.
00:01:25.599 --> 00:01:29.519
Frisch gave it a name borrowed from biology, Fission.
00:01:29.760 --> 00:01:34.640
Niels Bohr carried the news across the Atlantic in January 1939.
00:01:35.200 --> 00:01:43.040
American laboratories confirmed the splitting within weeks, but a splitting nucleus by itself is a laboratory curiosity.
00:01:43.280 --> 00:01:45.280
The question that mattered was different.
00:01:45.439 --> 00:01:48.000
Does fission throw off spare neutrons?
00:01:48.159 --> 00:01:51.920
Enough of them to split further nuclei and keep going?
00:01:52.239 --> 00:01:55.439
One man had been waiting six years for that question.
00:01:55.680 --> 00:02:12.080
Leo Silard, a Hungarian physicist then living in New York, had conceived of a neutron chain reaction in London in 1933, standing at a traffic light after reading a newspaper account of Ernest Rutherford dismissing atomic power as moonshine.
00:02:12.319 --> 00:02:22.159
He filed for a patent on it in 1934 and assigned the patent to the British Admiralty in 1936, specifically to keep it out of open literature.
00:02:22.479 --> 00:02:34.479
In early March 1939 at Columbia University, Solard and Walter Zinn watched an oscilloscope screen register the flashes of secondary neutrons coming off fissioning uranium.
00:02:34.719 --> 00:02:41.199
Solard later recalled that after they switched the equipment off, he had little doubt the world was headed for grief.
00:02:41.439 --> 00:02:46.159
His first response was not to warn anyone, it was to stop publishing.
00:02:46.400 --> 00:02:54.560
Through the spring, he pressed physicists in the United States, Britain, and France to withhold their chain reaction results voluntarily.
00:02:54.800 --> 00:03:00.159
The Paris group under Frederick Zolio-Curie declined and published in April.
00:03:00.400 --> 00:03:08.639
The approximate number of neutrons released per fission was now printed, available on any physics library shelf, including in Germany.
00:03:08.879 --> 00:03:11.199
And Germany had reasons to be reading.
00:03:11.439 --> 00:03:15.599
In March, German forces had taken the remainder of Czechoslovakia.
00:03:15.759 --> 00:03:24.080
The uranium mines at Johakimstall, the best known deposit in Europe, had already been there since the Sudetenland was handed over the autumn before.
00:03:24.319 --> 00:03:28.159
That spring, Berlin halted uranium sales from the mines.
00:03:28.319 --> 00:03:32.639
German physicists began meeting on the uranium question that same spring.
00:03:32.879 --> 00:03:35.919
What Solard lacked was any way to act on it.
00:03:36.159 --> 00:03:43.599
He was a refugee on a temporary appointment, with no laboratory, no funding, and no line to Washington.
00:03:43.840 --> 00:03:47.199
What he had instead was a friend somewhere on Long Island.
00:03:47.439 --> 00:03:54.960
In mid-July, Solard and Eugene Wigner drove out to Peconic, where Albert Einstein was renting a cabin for the summer.
00:03:55.280 --> 00:03:57.599
Silard explained the chain reaction.
00:03:57.840 --> 00:04:02.400
By Solard's account, Einstein said he had simply never thought of that.
00:04:02.639 --> 00:04:06.719
That detail matters, because it defines what Einstein contributed.
00:04:06.879 --> 00:04:15.120
His own work on mass and energy sat underneath Vision's arithmetic, but he had not followed the neutron experiments and had no part in them.
00:04:15.280 --> 00:04:17.439
He was not being asked for physics.
00:04:17.600 --> 00:04:21.519
He was being asked for a name that a head of state would not put down on red.
00:04:22.079 --> 00:04:36.639
Solard's target was not Roosevelt, it was Belgium, because the richest uranium ore then known lay in the Belgian Congo, worked by a Belgian mining company, and Einstein was personally acquainted with the Belgian Queen Mother Elizabeth.
00:04:36.879 --> 00:04:42.560
Einstein preferred to write to the Belgian ambassador, a friend, rather than to the Queen Mother.
00:04:42.720 --> 00:04:44.560
Wigner raised an objection.
00:04:44.879 --> 00:04:49.519
Private citizens should not approach a foreign government without telling the State Department.
00:04:49.759 --> 00:04:52.319
So a covering note to Washington was added.
00:04:52.560 --> 00:05:03.600
Alexander Sachs, an economist at Lehman Corporation with access to the White House, told Silard to aim higher, and offered to put a letter into Franklin Roosevelt's hands himself.
00:05:03.839 --> 00:05:11.600
In the last days of July, Silard went back to Peconic with Edward Teller, later to be named the father of the hydrogen bomb.
00:05:11.839 --> 00:05:14.319
Einstein dictated a draft in German.
00:05:14.560 --> 00:05:21.439
Silard took it to Columbia University and worked it into two English versions, one longer and one shorter.
00:05:21.600 --> 00:05:25.920
Then he mailed both to the cabin so that Einstein could choose between them.
00:05:26.160 --> 00:05:30.720
The date typed on that page is August 2, 1939.
00:05:30.959 --> 00:05:34.720
Accounts differ on precisely when Einstein put pen to it.
00:05:34.879 --> 00:05:40.000
What is certain is that he signed both versions and sent back word that he preferred the longer.
00:05:40.240 --> 00:05:43.120
The document itself is short and unexcited.
00:05:43.519 --> 00:05:55.040
It opens by crediting recent work by Enrico Fermi and Silard, communicated in manuscript, which suggested uranium might become an important new source of energy in the immediate future.
00:05:55.279 --> 00:06:04.879
It states that a chain reaction in a large mass of uranium appears conceivable, and that this would make possible extremely powerful bombs of a new type.
00:06:05.040 --> 00:06:10.160
The phrase atomic bomb never appears in the letter, neither does any promise.
00:06:10.399 --> 00:06:22.879
A single such bomb, the letter says, carried by boat and detonated in a port, might destroy the whole port and some surrounding territory, and might well prove too heavy to be carried by aircraft.
00:06:23.120 --> 00:06:25.199
That hedge is not timidity.
00:06:25.360 --> 00:06:29.120
It's an accurate description of what was known in 1939.
00:06:29.360 --> 00:06:31.839
Nobody had calculated a critical mass.
00:06:32.160 --> 00:06:40.399
Serious estimates ran to tons of material, which is why a boat, rather than a bomber, is the delivery method the letter imagines.
00:06:40.800 --> 00:06:43.040
Then the letter turns to supply.
00:06:43.279 --> 00:06:45.199
American ores are poor.
00:06:45.519 --> 00:06:51.680
Canada and the former Czechoslovakia have better, and the most important source is the Belgian Congo.
00:06:52.079 --> 00:07:04.480
And then it proposes that the administration designate someone to maintain permanent contact with the physicists working on chain reactions, to help secure a uranium supply, and to speed up experimental work.
00:07:04.639 --> 00:07:10.480
Possibly with funds contributed by private individuals and the cooperation of industrial laboratories.
00:07:10.720 --> 00:07:17.120
The final paragraph notes that Germany has stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines it took over.
00:07:17.279 --> 00:07:27.759
And the son of the German state secretary, von Weitsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where some of the American uranium work is being repeated.
00:07:28.079 --> 00:07:29.279
That was correct.
00:07:29.600 --> 00:07:35.040
Karl Friedrich von Weitsäcker was in fact working on the German uranium effort.
00:07:35.360 --> 00:07:46.000
Einstein signed as a man who had been an outspoken pacifist for two decades and had publicly qualified that position in 1933, with respect to Germany specifically.
00:07:46.240 --> 00:07:53.920
By 1939, he was in exile with confiscated property, and by widespread report, a price on his head.
00:07:54.160 --> 00:07:57.519
He was reasoning from what was available in 1939.
00:07:57.839 --> 00:08:02.720
Germany had the physicists, held the ore, and had made the discovery first.
00:08:02.959 --> 00:08:08.160
Records recovered after the war showed the German program never came close to a weapon.
00:08:08.399 --> 00:08:14.160
The letter's difficulty turned out not to be what it said, but rather how long it took to be read.
00:08:14.399 --> 00:08:24.480
Sachs held it for weeks, waiting to deliver it in person and catch a president whose attention was elsewhere, because on September 1st, Germany invaded Poland.
00:08:24.800 --> 00:08:30.319
Sachs finally saw Roosevelt on October 11th, more than two months after the date on the letter.
00:08:30.480 --> 00:08:43.120
By Saxe's own later testimony, it took him two sittings with Roosevelt, but by the end of the second, Roosevelt had cut through to the point himself that what Sax wanted was to keep the Nazis from blowing them up.
00:08:43.360 --> 00:08:46.399
He then told his aide the matter required action.
00:08:46.639 --> 00:08:56.240
The action was an advisory committee on uranium under Lyman Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards, which first met on October 21st.
00:08:56.559 --> 00:08:59.519
Salard, Wigner, and Teller attended.
00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:05.679
Its opening recommendation was$6,000 for graphite and uranium oxide.
00:09:05.919 --> 00:09:08.399
The money took months to actually arrive.
00:09:08.639 --> 00:09:10.399
Then, very little happened.
00:09:10.639 --> 00:09:17.279
Briggs' committee was cautious and compartmented, and American work stayed at bench scale through 1940.
00:09:17.600 --> 00:09:19.759
What broke the stall was British.
00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:31.360
In July 1941, the Maud Committee concluded that a bomb could be built from a critical mass measured in kilograms rather than tons, and could plausibly be finished during the war.
00:09:31.519 --> 00:09:39.039
That finding reached Roosevelt in October 1941, and by the following January had become an industrial program.
00:09:39.440 --> 00:09:43.279
Historians divide on what the letter therefore accomplished.
00:09:43.519 --> 00:09:46.159
One reading treats it as the origin point.
00:09:46.320 --> 00:09:50.080
It created the first federal body and the first federal dollars.
00:09:50.320 --> 00:10:02.000
Another holds that the committee it produced was so slow and so underfunded that it slowed work as much as it advanced it, and that the decisive push came from Britain and would have come regardless.
00:10:02.320 --> 00:10:12.159
Edgar Sanze, who ran the Belgian mining company that worked the Congo deposits, had been privately warned in 1939 about what uranium might become.
00:10:12.480 --> 00:10:19.759
In late 1940, he shipped more than a thousand tons of exceptionally rich ore to a warehouse on Staten Island.
00:10:19.919 --> 00:10:31.840
It sat there for nearly two years, while Sanjay tried and failed to make anyone care, until an army colonel finally came to see him in September 1942 and bought the entire stock.
00:10:32.159 --> 00:10:38.879
Sanjay is credited with giving the American government much of the uranium necessary for the Manhattan Project.
00:10:39.200 --> 00:10:41.600
Einstein never worked on the bomb.
00:10:41.840 --> 00:10:43.840
The army declined to clear him.
00:10:44.080 --> 00:10:48.000
His wartime consulting was minor work for the Navy on ordinance.
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In 1954, Linus Pauling recorded in his diary that Einstein told him signing that letter was the one great mistake of his life.
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That same day, different century.
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I'm Zach.
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We'll be back tomorrow with another date, another story.
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Thanks for listening.
