Herbert Lawrence Anderson (May 24, 1914 – July 16, 1988) was an American
nuclear physicist who was Professor of
Physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
.
He contributed to the
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...
. He was also a member of the team which made the first demonstration of nuclear fission in the United States, in the basement of
Pupin Hall
Pupin Physics Laboratories , also known as Pupin Hall, is home to the physics and astronomy departments of Columbia University in New York City. The building is located on the south side of 120th Street, just east of Broadway. In 1965, Pupin was ...
at
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
. He participated in the first atomic bomb test, codenamed
Trinity
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity (, from 'threefold') is the central dogma concerning the nature of God in most Christian churches, which defines one God existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God th ...
. After the close of World War II, he was a professor of physics at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
until his retirement in 1982. There, he helped Fermi establish the
Enrico Fermi Institute
__NOTOC__
The Institute for Nuclear Studies was founded September 1945 as part of the University of Chicago with Samuel King Allison as director. On November 20, 1955, it was renamed The Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies. The name was s ...
and was its director from 1958 to 1962. The latter part of his career was as a senior fellow at
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...
. He was a recipient of the
Enrico Fermi Award
The Enrico Fermi Award is a scientific award conferred by the President of the United States. It is awarded to honor scientists of international stature for their lifetime achievement in the development, use, or production of energy. It was establ ...
.
Education
Born in New York, New York, to a
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
family. Anderson's lineage to Rabbi
Meir Katzenellenbogen, the Maharam of Padua, is detailed in ''The Unbroken Chain''.
[Rosenstein, Neil. ''The Unbroken Chain: Biographical Sketches and Genealogy of Illustrious Jewish Families from the 15th-20th Century'', Volumes 1 and 2, Revised Edition, CIS Publishers: New York, 1990. ] Anderson earned three degrees at
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
, a Bachelor of Arts in 1931, a Bachelor of Science in
electrical engineering in 1935, and a PhD in
physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
in 1940.
[Harold M. Agnew '' Biographical Memoirs]
Herbert L. Anderson
' (National Academy of Sciences).
John R. Dunning, professor of physics at Columbia, closely followed the work of
Ernest Lawrence
Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American nuclear physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation fo ...
on the
cyclotron
A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest O. Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. Lawrence, Ernest O. ''Method and apparatus for the acceleration of ions'', filed: Jan ...
. Dunning wanted a more powerful neutron source and the cyclotron appeared as an attractive tool to achieve this end. During 1935 and 1936, he was able to construct a cyclotron using many salvaged parts to reduce costs and funding from industrial and private donations. The cyclotron design and building project began as Anderson was completing his engineering degree. At the suggestion of Professor Dana Mitchell, Dunning offered Anderson a teaching assistant position if he would also help with the design and building of the cyclotron. While working on his doctorate, Anderson made two major contributions to the project. The first was to design a high frequency filament supply, rather than the commonly used direct current version. This fostered longer filament life in the high magnetic field environment of a cyclotron. The second and more important contribution was the use of a pair of concentric lines to feed the cyclotron dees (cyclotron electrodes in the shape of a "D"), rather than the usual induction system. This refinement resulted in greater cyclotron efficiency and thereafter became a regular feature in cyclotron design. Others assisting Anderson in the construction of the cyclotron were
Eugene T. Booth,
G. Norris Glasoe, Hugh Glassford, and, of course, professor Dunning. In anticipation of conducting experiments with the cyclotron, Anderson also built an
ionization chamber
The ionization chamber is the simplest type of gas-filled radiation detector, and is widely used for the detection and measurement of certain types of ionizing radiation, including X-rays, gamma rays, and beta particles. Conventionally, the term ...
and a
linear amplifier
A linear amplifier is an electronic circuit whose output is proportional to its input, but capable of delivering more power into a load. The term usually refers to a type of radio-frequency (RF) power amplifier, some of which have output power m ...
in late 1938.
In December 1938, the German chemists
Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn (; 8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner ...
and
Fritz Strassmann
Friedrich Wilhelm Strassmann (; 22 February 1902 – 22 April 1980) was a German chemist who, with Otto Hahn in December 1938, identified the element barium as a product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons. Their observation was the ke ...
sent a manuscript to ''
Naturwissenschaften'' reporting they had detected the element
barium after bombarding
uranium
Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weak ...
with
neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to
Lise Meitner. Meitner, and her nephew
Otto Robert Frisch
Otto Robert Frisch FRS (1 October 1904 – 22 September 1979) was an Austrian-born British physicist who worked on nuclear physics. With Lise Meitner he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission (coining the term) and firs ...
,
correctly interpreted these results as being
nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on January 13, 1939. In 1944, Hahn received the
Nobel Prize for Chemistry
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then "M ...
for the discovery of nuclear fission. Some historians have documented the history of the discovery of nuclear fission and believe Meitner should have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn.
Even before it was published, Meitner's and Frisch's interpretation of the work of Hahn and Strassmann crossed the Atlantic Ocean with
Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 ...
, who was to lecture at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
.
Isidor Isaac Rabi
Isidor Isaac Rabi (; born Israel Isaac Rabi, July 29, 1898 – January 11, 1988) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance ima ...
and
Willis Lamb
Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (; July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum." The Nobel Committee that year awarded hal ...
, two
University of Columbia
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatta ...
physicists working at Princeton, heard the news and carried it back to Columbia. Rabi said he told Fermi; Fermi gave credit to Lamb. Bohr soon afterwards went from Princeton to Columbia to see Fermi. Not finding Fermi in his office, Bohr went down to the cyclotron area and found Anderson. Bohr grabbed him by the shoulder and said: "Young man, let me explain to you about something new and exciting in physics." It was clear to scientists at Columbia that they should try to detect the energy released in the nuclear fission of uranium from neutron bombardment. On January 25, 1939, Anderson was a member of the experimental team at Columbia University that conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States, which was conducted in the basement of
Pupin Hall
Pupin Physics Laboratories , also known as Pupin Hall, is home to the physics and astronomy departments of Columbia University in New York City. The building is located on the south side of 120th Street, just east of Broadway. In 1965, Pupin was ...
; the other members of the team were
Eugene T. Booth,
John R. Dunning,
Enrico Fermi,
G. Norris Glasoe, and
Francis G. Slack.
Fermi had arrived at Columbia only a short time before this historic demonstration. This bringing together of Fermi and Anderson resulted in a rewarding relationship lasting until the death of Fermi in 1954. Fermi and Anderson conducted a series of experiments at Columbia on the slowing down of neutrons in graphite, absorption and reflection of slow neutrons by numerous relevant materials, fissioning of uranium, and preliminary experiments using a lattice of uranium in graphite. A paper based on Anderson's PhD thesis, ''Resonance Capture of Neutrons by Uranium'', for security reasons, was not published until 10 years later.
Chain reaction
When, as part of the
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...
, the
Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) was started up at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
, in February 1942, Anderson worked under Fermi in the design and construction of
Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), which achieved the first manmade
nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942. Thereafter, Anderson led the construction of CP-2 at
Argonne National Laboratory in 1943. He was also a key consultant to
DuPont in the design and construction of the
Hanford reactors, which generated fissionable
plutonium
Plutonium is a radioactive chemical element with the symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibi ...
for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
In 1944, Anderson went to the
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...
, where he participated in using the Omega reactor to determine the critical mass of uranium-235. In preparation for the first nuclear device test on July 16, 1945, which was codenamed
Trinity
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity (, from 'threefold') is the central dogma concerning the nature of God in most Christian churches, which defines one God existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God th ...
, Anderson, with his radiochemist colleagues, developed a method of determining the
nuclear yield
The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is the amount of energy released when that particular nuclear weapon is detonated, usually expressed as a TNT equivalent (the standardized equivalent mass of trinitrotoluene which, if detonated, would produ ...
by collecting fission products at the detonation site. This technique was later perfected for nuclear yield determinations through the analysis of airborne fission products.
After the conclusion of World War II, Fermi and Anderson returned to the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
. There, they established the Institute for Nuclear Studies (today, the
Enrico Fermi Institute
__NOTOC__
The Institute for Nuclear Studies was founded September 1945 as part of the University of Chicago with Samuel King Allison as director. On November 20, 1955, it was renamed The Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies. The name was s ...
). At the University, Anderson was assistant professor of physics 1946 to 1947, associate professor 1947 to 1950, professor 1950 to 1977, and distinguished service professor 1977 to 1982. From 1958 to 1962, Anderson was director of the Enrico Fermi Institute.
In addition to Anderson's work in
Italy
Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
and
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
, he was intermittently at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Finally, he returned there in 1978 as a fellow and then a senior fellow until his death from an almost forty-year struggle with
berylliosis
Berylliosis, or chronic beryllium disease (CBD), is a chronic allergic-type lung response and chronic lung disease caused by exposure to beryllium and its compounds, a form of beryllium poisoning. It is distinct from acute beryllium poisoning, wh ...
. His death on July 16, 1988 at
Los Alamos, New Mexico, was on the 43rd anniversary of the first test of an atomic bomb.
His death was caused by lung failure, a derivative result of berylliosis—chronic beryllium poisoning, which he contracted during his work on the uranium project during the early days of World War II.
Honors and appointments
Anderson's distinguished career earned him a number of honors:
*1941 — Fellow of the American Physical Society
*1955 to 1957 – Appointed a
Guggenheim Fellow
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the a ...
*1956 to 1957 – Fulbright Lecturer in Italy
*1960 – Member of the
National Academy of Sciences
*1978 – Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
*1982 –
Enrico Fermi Award
The Enrico Fermi Award is a scientific award conferred by the President of the United States. It is awarded to honor scientists of international stature for their lifetime achievement in the development, use, or production of energy. It was establ ...
Works
;Articles
*H. L. Anderson,
E. T. Booth,
J. R. Dunning,
E. Fermi,
G. N. Glasoe, and
F. G. Slack ''The Fission of Uranium'', ''Phys. Rev.'' Volume 55, Number 5, 511 - 512 (1939). Institutional citation: Pupin Physics Laboratories, Columbia University, New York, New York. Received 16 February 1939.
*H. L. Anderson, E. Fermi, and
Leo Szilard
Leo Szilard (; hu, Szilárd Leó, pronounced ; born Leó Spitz; February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian-German-American physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear ...
''Neutron Production and Absorption in Uranium'', ''Phys. Rev.'' Volume 56, Issue 3, 284 - 286 (1939). Institutional citation: Columbia University, New York, New York. Received 3 July 1939.
*Harold M. Agnew and Herbert L. Anderson ''Double Magnetic Lens Nuclear Spectrometer'', ''Rev. Sci. Instrum.'' Volume 20, 869 (1949). Institutional citation: Institute for Nuclear Studies, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
*Herbert L. Anderson ''Resonance Capture of Neutrons by Uranium'', ''Phys. Rev.'' Volume 80, Issue 4, 499 - 506 (1950). Institutional citation: Columbia University, New York, New York. Received 27 April 1940. When Anderson submitted the paper, based on his doctoral thesis, he was a University Fellow, at Columbia University. For national security reasons, the paper was not published until 10 years later. By then, Anderson was at the Institute for Nuclear Studies, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
;Books
*Herbert L. Anderson ''AIP 50th Anniversary Physics Vade Mecum'' (American Institute of Physics, 1981)
*Herbert L. Anderson (Editor-in-Chief) ''A Physicist's Desk Reference'' (American Institute of Physics, New York, 1989)
*Herbert L. Anderson
John Ray Dunning 1907 – 1975' in ''Biographical Memoir'' 163-186 (National Academy of Sciences, 1989).
References
Citations
Sources
* Harold M. Agnew
irector of the Los Alamos National Laboratory 1970 to 1979'' Biographical Memoirs
Herbert L. Anderson' (National Academy of Sciences)
External links
1965 Audio Interview with Herbert L. Anderson by Stephane GroueffVoices of the Manhattan Project
1986 Audio Interview with Herbert L. Anderson by S. L. SangerVoices of the Manhattan Project
Oral History interview transcript for Herbert L. Anderson on 13 January 1981, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives - Session IOral History interview transcript for Herbert L. Anderson on 13 January 1981, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives - Session IIAnnotated Bibliography for Herbert L. Anderson from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear IssuesNational Academy of Sciences Biographical MemoirGuide to the Herbert L. Anderson Papers 1911-1988from th
University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
{{DEFAULTSORT:Anderson, Herbert L.
1914 births
1988 deaths
20th-century American physicists
American people of German-Jewish descent
Jewish American scientists
Jewish physicists
Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Fellows of the American Physical Society
Manhattan Project people
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
University of Chicago faculty
Enrico Fermi Award recipients
Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel
Santa Fe Institute people
20th-century American Jews