Theodore Petry, Jr., Worked on the Manhattan Project
Theodore Petry, Jr., was the last surviving witness to the first sustained nuclear chain reaction, known as the Manhattan Project, which took place under Alonzo Stagg Stadium at the University of Chicago in 1942. He passed away on August 6, 2018. He was one of 49 people who witnessed that first attempt at nuclear power.
He considered himself to be ‘a laborer, a gofer’, someone who runs errands for the tech guys – physicists, in this case, but is listed as a lab assistant by the University of Chicago.
https://www.uchicago.edu/features/a_witness_to_atomic_history/
One of 30+ ‘laborers” hired to build the primitive reactor, stacking wood to support it and building it with the 45,000 graphite blocks that formed its lattice structure. In his own words, when he was 17 a job was a job, and he didn’t question what was going on. He took the bus from his parents’ home in Englewood to the University to work on construction the reactor and used a hydraulic press to turn uranium powder into baseball-sized spheres that formed the fuel for the reactor. He also went downtown to pick up those radioactive materials in little canisters, until his red cell count dropped. After that, it was put into a lead container and he picked it up in a station wagon, instead of carrying it back to the University on a city bus.
An interview with him done in March this year is here:
https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/theodore-petrys-interview
The Manhattan Project employed over 600,000 people in developing, building and testing nuclear weapons. Some of the leading physicists at the time who worked on it were Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer, among others. Einstein had warned the US government that Germany was developing materials and facilities to build nuclear bombs. The Nazis had seized a heavy water plant in Norway for that purpose. Many of the physicists participating in the Manhattan Project were refugees from Europe.
Interestingly, Klaus Fuchs, a theoretical physicist, fled the Reich and ended up in Canada, subsequently moving to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project, and was also a spy for the Soviets, passing nuclear secrets to them.
But the last of that group of people is now gone. Mr. Petry worked as a shop teacher after finishing college. He passed due to complications of esophageal cancer. He had four children and declared that they were all quite healthy, despite his early exposure to raw radioactive materials.
Category: Historical
Interesting, he worked on a project that happened to change the world.
Thanks, Ex!
Thanks, Ed.
This is 76 years later, and the low-cost energy that nuclear reactors provide is viewed as poisonous to the planet.
And the people who complain the most about nuclear power might not be alive today if the bomb hadn’t been built.
My Dad worked on the Manhatten Project also, he was a “Pipe Fitter” , those men that layed out steam lines in symetrical patterns on the walls…..I don’t believe he ever witnessed any set off..but he was not in the service during WWII because of it…!
During the first 30 or so years of the last century, it was common practice to paint the numbers on watch dials with radium, as it actually glowed. Those doing this work were almost exclusively women and came to be known as Radium Girls. They ‘sharpened’ the point of the tiny brushes with their lips. The brushes were often no more than a few animal hairs. They also painted their fingernails, toenails, teeth, eyelashes, etc. Within a few years, the girls began to develop oral cancer. At that time, the remedy was radical surgery. I do not think there was such a thing as radiation therapy until later in the century. Most died, usually horribly disfigured, as the surgery simply postponed the inevitable. They were told the radium was harmless.
Trijicon gun sights (called “night sights” by a lot of people) and Luminox watches still use a (safer) version of this technology. They use tritium instead of radium.
All honest work is honorable. ALL. He considered himself a gofer, probably not realizing the importance of the project on which he was working. It may be he never knew the end result of the project.
Thank you, Sir, for being an honorable worker, a gofer as you describe yourself. I wish you fair winds and following seas.
Thanks Ex-PH2. Thanks to Mr. Petry, Jr. for all he did in the service of our country. Rest in peace Sir and God be with your family.
RIP Mr. Petry..as for Fuchs, well, the name speaks for itself… amazing how many communists managed to infiltrate every level of our government under FDR / Wilson… what party were they members of again??
I saw what you did there Fyrfighter. Bad dog, no biscuit. Would that be the same party that also begat, Truman, Kennedys, Johnson, Carter, Clintons, and oblowme. RIP Mr. Petry. Good post Ex-PH2. Always good to get the side bar info-tainment pieces. Nice to learn something new and not have to work hard to learn it.
Frankly, I had no idea that even one person was left from that business. I thought they had all passed away long ago.
Me and probably most of the rest of us, neither. You done good digging this one up, but that what Sisters are known for, finding something to keep her brothers out of mischief. As long as we’re reading and commenting our hands are not busy with the devil’s work. Been meaning to say that running this site is kinda like running a dairy farm, cows got to be milked every day. You, Dave, AW1ED, TSO, Hondo,2/17, Poe,besig, The Soviet, the monkey code hippie chick, and all that I may have missed, have done one hell of a job keeping it and us going. For that We Salute! jc nsnr
May Mr. Petry rest in peace.
At a university, I dismantled a sub-critical reactor and moved it into storage. The uranium rods were clad in aluminum being about 3″ in diameter and 3′ long. Natural uranium is denser than lead, thus quite heavy. An 8x8x8 inch brick weighs about 60 pounds. Thus Petry’s story of transporting “not very heavy” cans in his pocket sounds odd to me.
I also question his story about low red blood cell count. Uranium is an alpha emitter (though the daughter, Th-234 has a couple low energy, low emission rate gammas). When uranium is clad, there is little to no detectable emissions. How Petry could have gotten a dose of radiation high enough to affect his red blood cell count would be interesting to determine.
IIRC, the “starter” source for the CP-1 was a radium/beryllium source, which will present with a goodly amount of measurable radiation. I doubt seriously they would have let Petry handle this source as the effects of radium were getting to be well known by this time.
Though his story has some holes, I thank him and all who worked on the CP-1. Their work eventually led to a good career for me.
I do know that uranium could be bought as a powdered substance, because until it was deemed “dangerous” (whatever the label was) it was used in ceramics to produce a brilliant red glaze called sang de boeuf or oxblood. The Chinese had been using it for that for centuries.
It’s been used in ceramics and glassmaking for centuries. Until it was deemed too dangerous to use, it was the yellow, orange-red, and red glazes used in Fiestaware.
What Petry picked up was probably the powdered version, not smelted and clad. He does indicate that he used a hydraulic press to compress it into baseball-sized spheres for the reactor.
Ex-PH2; you are correct re the use of uranium in ceramics. When fired, it is what gives the orange color to Fiesta Ware orange plates. It is not dangerous to eat off the plate ware as the tiny dose rate is down to nothing at about a fork length or less. Of possible concern is if a piece of the ceramic containing uranium can be ingested. It is possible, but you will poop it all out in a couple of days because the uranium is in a chemical form which the body will not absorb.
RE Petry, when I read the transcript of his oral history, it is not clear that he was doing the compression, just that it was being done at the facility. He was an old guy, and the fact that he got to work on the project in any capacity is very cool.
Not nice to fool mother nature, just like using radium to make hands of a watch glow lol….
I was a nuclear medicine technologist stationed at Bethesda, 72-77. One of my collaterals was to measure the residual radiation in survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They disrobed, put on a gown and sat in a small room, maybe 8×8 or smaller that was completely encased with lead ‘bricks’. Even the ceiling was lead, though sheeting and not bricks. Some of them still had the imprint of the clothing they were wearing at the time of their exposure. They all also had some amount of radiation, though the amount was quite small and would pose no threat to anyone else. It’s been over 45 years and I can no longer recall the isotopes or amounts. There were about, oh, 75 patients in the NIH research study. They got counted twice a year if I remember correctly. Wonder if that study is ongoing? Probably so. I never knew a government study that was voluntarily cancelled.
We had a whole body counter at UCLA. We were connected to one of the National labs to provide whole body counting in the event of an emergency. Never had any National people come, but we kept it calibrated and would scan our own folks. With all of its shielding, it was a great room in which to take a nap. Re the Hiroshima folks, the main nuclide to look for was Cs-137 ingested from fallout; with a 662 KeV gamma, the scintillation detectors easily picked it up. Not a lot of survivors left due principally to age. The last I heard, whole body counting for survivors was only being done in Japan.
aGrimm: We used 137Cs, 57Co and a few others for QC purposes and as spot markers. 99mTc was our parent isotope and constituted 90% of our scans. Others were 131I, 67Ga, 111In (cisternograms), 133Xe (VQ), 90Sr, 169Ytterbium, 123I. I would need a refresher course; I’m guessing at some of the numbers. Been many years. The clinic turned out probably 750 RIA procedures a week. About 200 scans. I could not have chosen a better career as a Corpsman. It was very rewarding. I started with rectilinear scanners which I believe are unknown to today’s beginning nukes. Damn it was fun.
aGrimm: Were you clinical or research? Civilian or military trained? Just curious. Only research I had was dogs, monkeys, pigs. Some dead, some alive. You haven’t lived until you try to catch a radioactive animal coming out from anesthesia and attempting escape. If lucky, they could be corralled before spreading radioactive pee/poop throughout the clinic. We lost several rooms to contamination by crazed pig. LOL If lucky, we were ‘only’ dealing with 99mTc.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Regards …
HMC: Came home from Nam and immediately pursued a BS degree, which eventually was granted in Nuc Med Technology. Learned to use a rectilinear, but the gamma camera was rapidly replacing it. Worked 3 years as a tech running two small hospital NM departments. The radiologists I worked with were detestable and I didn’t see any upward mobility so I accepted a State radiation control inspector position. This gave me a skill set that led me to becoming the radiation safety officer for a couple companies and then three university health physics jobs. For sheer learning, UCLA was the best as I worked with some of the most knowledgeable researchers in the world using radiation in all its forms in biology, physics, medicine and more. I would teach their incoming students how to safely use radiation and in turn I got an education and a half when they would tell me about their research. Radiation safety at a university is a great job. One day you are a professor and the next day a garbage (radioactive material) man.
And oh boy can I relate to your stories! Haven’t chased any “hot” pigs, but disposed of quite few. Had to chase down a few contaminated people. Want to email? Sounds like we could share some good war stories. larrygrimm(at)comcast(dot)net.
What about people who were exposed to radiation from the meltdown at the Fukushima reactor during the Honshu quake? Would they be included in that kind of thing now?
PH: Those folks could be followed until their death. Some may live 100 years. With today’s even more sophisticated equipment, even the most minuscule radioactivity can be detected. I’m thinking, too, that in addition to ‘Is it there,’ today’s scanners can actually pinpoint WHERE it is in the body, which further enhances our understanding of the long-term effects of radiation, both diagnostic and therapeutic. Just calibrate the camera to the correct Kev (energy) with the proper lead collimation and there you are. Comparing todays nuclear medicine equipment to that of the 1970s is like comparing today’s super computer to an IBM PC Junior (my first computer … if you can call it that. It was mostly a $2000 typewriter). Good question. Wish I were back in the field.
aGrimm: Re his carrying of ‘not very heavy’ items in his pocket, could it be he was actually transporting radioactive materials but it was contained within a small pig, configured to the small package? (I’ll leave those other than aGrimm to ponder that. He knows of what I speak.). Your thoughts?