Holmberg, Robert

              THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY ORAL HISTORY PRESENTATION PROGRAM
OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE
AN INTERVIEW WITH
ELLISON TAYLOR
AND
ROBERT HOLMBERG
FOR THE OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
INTERVIEWED BY
STEPHEN H. STOW
AND
MARILYN Z. MCLAUGHLIN (ASSISTANT)
OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE
February 3, 2003
TRANSCRIPT BY
BRIAN VARNER
STEVE STOW: Today we are interviewing Bob Holmberg, a senior staff scientist in the
ORNL Chemistry Division, and Ellison Taylor, former director of the Chemistry Division.
HOLMBERG: Well, I always like to say I've never had an honest job. I've worked in the
Manhattan District and its predecessors all my life.
STOW: (laughs) Careful. We won't edit that out. (laughter)
HOLMBERG: All right. When I was an undergraduate at Iowa State College in those
days getting my degree in chemistry, about ten or twelve of us were interviewed by what
we called a "big time operator" -- all together from a place called the Metallurgical
Laboratories of the University of Chicago. He couldn't tell us what they were doing. It
was secret. But it had to do with energy and things like that. It wasn't hard to put this
together. I had read at least two articles in magazines like Collier's or Saturday Evening
Post on fission. And I said, "That's what they're doing – nuclear energy." So I said,
"That's a good thing to apply to for a job." And, of course, we could use our professors
for references. And, they said, "Bob, we're doing the same thing here. Why don't you
come work for us?" And, of course, I chose that rather than going into the wilds of
Chicago. And, I've been on the project ever since. I got drafted shortly after I started
work at Ames (Iowa) – I had a vigorous four days of basic training, was sent back to
Chicago, where I wired my mother to send me civilian clothes, and came back to Ames
in civilian clothes, but as a buck private in the Army. And, eventually, the project slowed
down there and they sent me to Oak Ridge. In Oak Ridge, I was assigned to work at the
Castle on the Hill for Doc Jerry Cole. This was the Manhattan District Research Division
at that time. It was a fairly small division and, I worked for him. He decided to leave
shortly afterwards, and as he was leaving I said, "Offer me a job, Jerry, so I can get out
of the Army." And, he did that and I've been at ORNL for forty years.
STOW: (laughs) What were your first impressions of Oak Ridge as a city and a place to
live?
HOLMBERG: Well, I came here as a GI -- we had a barracks area at the time, so it was
still a little muddy and it was still primitive by today's standards. We lived in small rooms
in dormitories that you shared with other people. It was a young man's town and a
young woman's town. So, it was a great place to live for young singles.
STOW: And, were you a single man at the time?
HOLMBERG: I was a single man.
STOW: Ellison, were you a single man?
TAYLOR: No, I was married and had one child.
STOW: What did your wife think of Oak Ridge as a place to live?
TAYLOR: Not very much. (laughter). The chief thing I remember in detail about it was
that she went out one night finally by herself, thinking she could drive around and
manage without me along, and she got lost coming back because all the houses looked
alike. She couldn't tell when she was home.
STOW: Was it a cemesto house?
TAYLOR: Yeah, we got a cemesto house. We were lucky. We really didn't have any
hardship.
STOW: Was it a -- an A, B, C or do you recall?
TAYLOR: It was a B.
STOW: A B house.
TAYLOR: We were entitled to B, because we had one child.
STOW: All right. What was your first job when you got here, Ellison? You were in the
Chemistry Division, but what sort of technical work did you do first?
TAYLOR: Well, the Laboratory was working on what later became the Homogeneous
Reactor, which had to be decontaminated as a result of its radiation. This was a reactor
that had a water solution of some sort of uranium compound.
STOW: Was that a breeder reactor?
TAYLOR: No, it was much more elementary than that. The goal was to make a reactor
with the uranium in solution or in a slurry. Irradiation of water decomposes it, producing
hydrogen and oxygen. That poses a problem for a reactor, because if you have
hydrogen and oxygen all in one place, you could have an explosive mixture. And that's
not a good thing in any sort of operation, particularly if you have a reactor that you're
running with all sorts of things going on around it. So, they wanted to develop a catalyst
that would recombine the oxygen and hydrogen into water, more or less, as fast as it
was formed, so that they only had negligible pressure of this explosive gas above the
solution reactor. And, since I had had some experience developing catalysts, that was
what I was supposed to do. So, my job was to set up some equipment to make some
catalysts and try them out on a small scale to see if and how they might work for this.
One man was hired before I came to ORNL to work on it with me. He had been working
over at the S-50 plant, which was the Liquid Thermal Diffusion Plant for separating the
uranium isotopes. The people at the Lab didn't know what sort of program they ought to
have in catalysis, so they were waiting for me to get here and so was he. And he was
getting kind of nervous and wasn't very happy that I'd delayed so long in getting here.
But, we finally got started and worked for a little while on that. And then, it became
obvious that there were other ways to solve this gas problem, so the catalyst approach
was dropped. We were going to make what is called a heterogeneous catalyst -- that is,
a solid that would just sit in the liquid and do its thing. It turned out that it was much
more effective to use a homogeneous catalyst -- something like copper or copper salt
dissolved in the water ... certainly an effective catalyst and much easier to manage in a
solution reactor of that sort. So, our catalyst program kind of dissolved. But, we
immediately set out thinking of things that we might do in the way of catalysis relating to
radiation. And, until he went back to college to get a degree the next spring, we tried
some preliminary experiments to see what the reactor did with catalysts.
STOW: Bob, what was the first job that you were assigned when you got here?
HOLMBERG: My first job was in the Army and there I worked for Jerry Cole.
STOW: I understand.
HOLMBERG: Primarily, I was doing some work that I was unqualified for and S-50 was
brought up.
TAYLOR: Oh my ...
HOLMBERG: I was writing ... at least I was supposed to write a section of the Smyth
Report describing the S-50 plant. I had about two months to do that but by that time, the
Smyth Report came out. Jerry left, and I was offered a job at the Lab. I got out here in
July of 1946 and went immediately to work for Kurt Kraus in plutonium chemistry. It was
an interesting experience because I don't recall ever having been trained in
microchemistry manipulations and the dangers or hazards of plutonium. It was just a
common thing. We worked in open hoods and ...
STOW: But, the danger of plutonium was well known going back to the early 1940s.
HOLMBERG: Yes.
STOW: Was it a safe work environment, do you think?
HOLMBERG: I thought it was a safe work environment. We used fairly large amounts of
plutonium. I once had a test tube in my open hood with a hundred milligrams of
plutonium in the sixth valence state that I was using for some experiments. It's my
understanding in the later days that that was more plutonium than Oak Ridge National
Laboratory would allow.
STOW: We may have that much spread around on old lab benches now. (laughs)
HOLMBERG: One of the big problems at that time was that only a few people had cars.
Most of us took buses. In the course of our work, we'd get a few counts of plutonium. So
we had to get our hands clean before going home on the bus. We had hand counters.
You have to scrub your hands with soap and water and, if that didn't get it all off, you
tried dipping your hands in hydrochloric acid and following it up by dipping them in
sodium hydroxide. There was a whole formula that had been passed down to me on
how to clean your hands and get them count free.
STOW: Probably would not be acceptable in today's environment, I don't think.
HOLMBERG: (laughs) I don't think it would be acceptable.
STOW: What about issues related to disposal of nuclear waste out of the laboratories,
and so on? Was there much consideration given to that in 1945 when you got here,
Ellison? Or a year later in '46 ... ?
TAYLOR: Yes, it seemed to me that it was just exactly what you needed to do. You kept
the waste in a separate place. You didn't spread it around. There were hot drains in
some of the sinks, which led to containment -- not into the regular sewers. The stuff that
went into sewers passed through some sort of processing before it ended up in storage
tanks. And, from the viewpoint of those days and from the practical necessities of doing
these things in a finite amount of time, it impressed me from the beginning as just about
the right level of precautions.
STOW: Good. In looking back at personnel records for the years when you fellows
initially came, there's some names that jump out at me -- individuals who ended up with
fairly prestigious careers in the chemical sciences elsewhere. George Boyd, Harrison
Brown, Merlin Peterson ... but they went on elsewhere and were employed in other
laboratories. Lyle Borst was another one. Can you recall any interactions with those
people? And, what kept you guys here?
TAYLOR: Well, the fact that it was a job kept me here.
STOW: Yes.
TAYLOR: Also, that it was interesting. Yes, I knew most of those people, some pretty
well, some not so well. Harrison Brown, for instance, was the assistant director of the
Chemistry Division when I came here, and he was the person I talked to most often in
the early days when I was trying to set up a program in catalysis for their reactor. And,
he and I had lots of discussions about where we could get people and how much money
we could spend to buy equipment for this new thing. He soon became pretty busy in the
effort that people at the Laboratory were making to be sure that atomic energy -- later
called nuclear energy -- was used in a reasonable fashion. In the beginning, a number
of people at the Laboratory and a few from K-25, and perhaps some from Y -12, got
together and decided they ought to promote the idea among the general public in an
educational manner that nuclear energy was here to stay. There wasn't anything we
could do about it, and there was no way that we were going to keep it from other
countries that might want to use it against us. And so, we'd better be getting on with
some sort of arrangements worldwide to make sure that it was only used peacefully.
And, an organization was formed that eventually had the acronym AORES --
Association of Oak Ridge Engineers and Scientists. This was not a work-related job; it
was an after-hours job, although many of the people, some of whom you've mentioned,
did a good deal of telephoning during the day to people at other AEC sites in Chicago,
Los Alamos, and so on. This organization sent out lecturers to places that were
interested in it, to talk about the problems that atomic energy was going to pose for the
world. We had, I think, three principles that we espoused. I can think of only two of
them. One was that there was no defense against nuclear energy. If somebody else had
a bomb and decided to drop it on us, there really wasn't any defense. It has too massive
an effect. The second was that there was no way of keeping it secret. Any country with
any scientific establishment could go ahead and make an atomic bomb. So, it wasn't
going to be any use in keeping it secret. It wasn't going to be our secret for very long.
And so, we espoused the idea that the world should get together and decide what to do
with this in a peaceful way. So, we sent out groups of one, two, or three people to
universities or groups in other places that have an interest in this and gave public
lectures, trying to drum up support. That was the chief non-work activity, I think, that
occupied a great many people at the Laboratory. Among them, Harrison Brown and
Charles Coryell were really the most moving spirits among us. Charles was legendary
for his tremendous use of the telephone, much of it for technical reasons. All of us had
to call around to various other places, particularly to Chicago because of the
interrelation of the research, but some of this, of course, carried over to things like
seeing what they were doing in Chicago concerning this kind of "advertising" about the
properties of nuclear energy for the security of the world.
STOW: In 1947 the Atomic Energy Commission came in to run the Oak Ridge facilities,
as well as Los Alamos and the other facilities. Did you see any changes that could be
directly tied to the presence of the Atomic Energy Commission? Bob, any ideas there?
HOLMBERG: Certainly, not at my level. At that time, I was pretty much laboratoryoriented,
and we had gone through the problem of losing Chicago as our contractor ...
TAYLOR: That came almost a year after the AEC came in. Monsanto came in January
of 1947 as the Lab contractor, I believe. During all that year, they had already decided
on the University of Chicago as a new contractor for the Laboratory to replace
Monsanto, which had operated it since 1945. Before that, DuPont was the operating
contractor, although under the University of Chicago. But now, in 1947, Chicago was
going to take it over as soon as they could find a new director for the Laboratory to
replace Martin Whitaker, who had been the director of it from the beginning. And, that
didn't go well. AEC people talked to a good many prominent scientists -- mostly, if not,
exclusively physicists -- and brought them here for interviews. The candidates met the
people at the Laboratory, who had dinners for them and showed them around the
Laboratory. None of them wanted to take over the directorship. And, toward the end of
1947, the AEC settled on having an interim director, Warren Johnson, who had gone
back to the University of Chicago Chemistry Department, from his position during the
war as director of the Chemistry Division here. He was the first director of the Chemistry
Division. So that was the situation toward the end of 1947. Chicago was still going to be
the operating contractor, and we were going to have an interim director, Warren
Johnson. And, the AEC was still going to find a permanent director of great distinction
who would run the Laboratory. But, then the AEC gave up -- shortly before Christmas in
1947 – and decided to take an easier way out. They would have Union Carbide operate
the Laboratory. Carbide was already the operator for K-25, which had the largest
organization – most Carbide people in Oak Ridge were already used to the city and
knew something about the Laboratory. So, in December of '47, the AEC announced that
Union Carbide would be the new Lab contractor and announced some other changes
that struck deeply at the rather vague plans we had for the future of the Laboratory. The
Lab was planning on two or three different kinds of reactors that it wanted to build and
expected that the Laboratory would be a site, if not the chief center, for the reactors in
the AEC complex. AEC had decided at that point that they would move all the reactor
work to the Argonne Laboratory in Chicago, the successor to the Metallurgical
Laboratory after the war ...
STOW: Yes.
TAYLOR: ... and that would leave to Oak Ridge National Laboratory the work on
development of waste treatment of nuclear fuel for extracting plutonium fission products
– namely, a chemical processing laboratory. Well, this didn't fit at all into the ideas that
we had had for what we might make of the Laboratory, and so there was great
unhappiness. On Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, at a whole series of parties,
people got together to bemoan the newest developments and make nasty remarks
about the AEC and Union Carbide. At the time Clark Center was the president of Union
Carbideʼs office in Oak Ridge. All of this turned out for the best in the end, I think. Our
negative impressions of Union Carbide had been based mostly on lack of knowledge. A
number of their lesser administrators who thought Carbide might take over the
Laboratory made snide remarks such as, "Well, we'll straighten out that country club."
And, since they were an industrial chemical firm, we had some idea that they might
have pretty severe ideas about how to run a research laboratory. So, we didn't like the
idea and character of Carbide. I'll put most of it in the laps of Clark Center, who it turns
out, really knew how to run a research laboratory from the position that he held relative
to it. And, in the end, he was responsible, perhaps as much as anybody, for the success
of the Laboratory with respect to AEC, which got things straightened out so that we did
participate in reactor programs. We did keep up a basic research program, and evolved
into, more or less, the Laboratory we are today.
STOW: Yes. Alvin Weinberg is very complimentary of Clark Center.
TAYLOR: Yes ...
STOW: ... and points out that he was instrumental in saving the Lab within two years
after "Black Christmas."
TAYLOR: Yes. A great many people left the Laboratory. Ones that could find other jobs
left for them. It was a black period.
STOW: Bob?
HOLMBERG: Ellison left out one important point.
STOW: Yeah ...
HOLMBERG: I didn't know Ellison very well. He worked at the other end of the building.
TAYLOR: Yes, the chemistry building was rather long -- there were three wings. I
worked in the west wing. He worked in the east wing ...
STOW: Okay.
TAYLOR: ... and the administrators were up front in the middle wing ...
HOLMBERG: But, he became famous during this "Black Friday" by writing a poem,
which he did not allude to in this ...
TAYLOR: Well ...
HOLMBERG: ... and so, after that, everybody knew Ellison Taylor.
STOW: Is that the "Deck the Halls" poem?
HOLMBERG: Yes.
TAYLOR: Yes, but I didn't draft ... actually the person that started it was Frank Miles. I
came to the party when they were already working on it, and Frank Miles, Jim Standy,
and I finished it. And Alvin Weinberg's memory of it was somewhat fallible. He thought
the language we used was somewhat worse than what we actually did. We just said ...
one of the lines was "AEC has screwed us clearly." Well, he didn't remember it just that
way.
HOLMBERG: (laughs)
STOW: I think he published it somewhat differently in his book.
TAYLOR: Yes, he did. (laughter)
STOW: Umm, what was your morale like at that time, Bob? I mean, you were kind of
down in the trenches I guess, but ...
HOLMBERG: I was down in the trenches ... it wasn't that personal. I, like everybody
else, didn't like the idea of Carbide coming in, but there was little I could do about it. And
so, I just continued my work life.
STOW: Well, Jerry Cole continued as division director for chemistry, I understand, and
Ellison, you were assistant division director.
TAYLOR: Yeah. He made me assistant division director at in the late spring or early
summer of 1946, after he'd been here for three or four months, and I'd been here for
half-a-year. I think he wanted somebody to help him. There had been a rather formal
administration in the division at that time, like all the rest of the Laboratory. The
Chemistry Division had a director, an assistant director, section chiefs, assistant section
chiefs or associates, and then group leaders. So, there was this rather large
organization with maybe more managers than troops. And, Jerry simplified that by fiat.
As a result, we had just the division director and group leaders. But he wanted to get an
assistant. Of course, the logical thing would have been to get one of the few section
chiefs that stayed, but I think he thought that there probably would be a certain amount
of jealousy if he appointed one of them. So he picked me. He asked me if I would be
assistant director perhaps because I was the oldest of the new people that came here.
Well, at the time, I wasn't all that interested in it, but I decided it would be a good idea to
accept, because it would give me a fall-back position if the research I was vaguely
planning didn't pan out. I could fall back on the fact that I had some administrative work
to do. So I said, "Well, yes I'll do it, if I can spend half my time doing research. I'll do
administration in the morning and research in the afternoon, or whatever way it works."
So, he said, "Sure, fine." And so, just very informally, I picked that up and I kept that, at
least in my mind all the rest of my career. I don't think anybody else really thought about
it much, but I always felt to myself that I was doing a half-time administrative job, and
that I was to spend half my work time on research.
STOW: I doubt one could do that in today's environment.
TAYLOR: I doubt it very much. One can hardly do full-time research as a division
director.
STOW: Well, let's touch on a few things that went on during the 1950s. Bob, what did
your job evolve into during the 1950s, after you'd been here for five or six years?
HOLMBERG: Well, I was still with Kurt Kraus for five or six years...
STOW: Were you?
HOLMBERG: We had moved into the 4500 Building. Plutonium chemistry was gone. I
was still working on heavy metal chemistry. I was also going to school at the University
of Tennessee and doing coursework leading to my Ph.D. degree. My original intentions
were never to stay here ... (laughs)
STOW: Here you are ...
HOLMBERG: Here I am ... Eventually I changed from working for Kurt Kraus in solution
chemistry to working with Ralph Livingston on electron-spin resonance, on which I did
my thesis.
STOW: Yes. And, in 1951, Ellison, I think you hired Sheldon Datz to come work for you,
did you not?
TAYLOR: Yeah. I had hired him originally as a dishwasher in my group at Columbia
University. He had just graduated from high school and was looking for a job. And he
was bright and wanted the job, so he came on. He didn't tum out to be a very good
dishwasher because we found so many other things that he could do, and I formed a
very good opinion of his abilities -- both experimental and mental. Then he was drafted
into the Navy. After the war, he went to Columbia and earned a bachelor's degree and a
master's degree and was looking for a job. I hired him for the research I had already
started on trying to use molecular beams to study mechanisms of chemical reactions.
STOW: Well, did that work lead, at least in part, to his getting the Fermi Award?
TAYLOR: Well, it was part of it, yes. Although, I'm pretty sure if that's all he had done, he
might have qualified for other sorts of awards, but not for the Fermi Award, because the
molecular beam work doesn't have any particular relevance to nuclear energy, which
the Fermi Award was started to recognize. But yes, that was his major accomplishment
in that field, both with me and later with other people that he got hold of.
STOW: Let me spin off your association with Sheldon for a moment. Now that each of
you look back over your careers at ORNL and originally Clinton Laboratories, you've
rubbed elbows with a large number of individuals in the chemical sciences and in the
physical sciences, that have turned out to be quite well renowned individuals in their
own rights. Can you identify one or two people that you really have admired as
coworkers or peers here at ORNL that you'd like to mention?
TAYLOR: Yeah, well, I'd go back to the two people Bob worked for. Kurt Kraus, first ...
HOLMBERG: Um hmm.
TAYLOR: and Ralph Livingston, second. Bob's told you a little bit about his work with
Kurt. Now, he hasn't emphasized Kurt's impact on chemical science, but it was very
great. He was an extraordinary inorganic chemist -- he had all sorts of ideas. He
understood experiment and theory and he knew how to use good people. He produced
a tremendous amount of research that revolutionized various parts of chemistry,
including things that are extremely useful in industrial separation processes using ion
exchange. And, for a number of years, he was the head of our water research project,
whose main practical goal was producing potable water from the sea using nuclear
energy. Reaching this goal required a great deal of chemical engineering and all sorts of
research and development. The other person Bob worked for more recently was Ralph
Livingston, one of the most extraordinary people we had at the Laboratory. Just to make
a general statement, I used to remark to people sometimes that we surely had made a
great splash in science with the second team from the Laboratory. All the people with
the greatest reputations who had done the most spectacular work during the war had
returned to their universities, or wherever they came from, leaving us with people who
had smaller jobs, less publicity, and fewer accomplishments during the war. But, with
people like Kurt and Ralph Livingston, the Chemistry Division produced research that, at
that time, I think matched what was being done at any of the great universities in the
country. Ralph Livingston, in particular, was just a genius at taking new physical
techniques, such as electron-spin resonance and pure quadrupole spectroscopy, and
applying them to chemical problems. Ralph and I worked briefly together on electronspin
resonance. The technique of electron-spin resonance had just been invented.
Ralph immediately saw its applications to various problems we had at the laboratory
and built all the apparatus to do this. I had some samples at the time that I had been
irradiating at very low, liquid nitrogen temperatures with gamma rays, to see if I could
find out something about the free radicals that were formed there. And, Ralph said,
"Look, let me look at some of these samples with ESR to see if I can identify any free
radicals." I expected these free radicals to be produced during irradiation of materials
with gamma rays and other ionizing radiation. And, about the first sample that I gave
him came up with unmistakable evidence that hydrogen atoms were formed -- neutral
hydrogen atoms, not molecules -- frozen in the liquid in which I'd produced them,
sulfuric acid. And, starting with there, he went on to a whole series of research findings
detailing what atoms form during irradiation, particularly in water and aqueous solutions,
which are very important to reactors, for instance. They are also very important in
biology, since most of a person is water and irradiation effects are dominated by what
happens in the aqueous solutions we're made of.
STOW: Ellison, you may want to come back to that in a moment as an accomplishment
of your life. I wanted to ask each of you to reflect on your careers here at ORNL and
identify the one or two greatest accomplishments that you think you made to science,
politics, the well-being of the Laboratory or your profession, or whatever. Bob, let me
start with you.
HOLMBERG: Well, that's a hard one. I think probably my best studies were the studies
of single crystals ...
TAYLOR: Oh, those beautiful crystals you grew! Huge crystals!
STOW: All right.
HOLMBERG: And studying the anisotropic spectra ... electron-spin resonance that we
had to identify free radicals in crystals.
STOW: These were crystals of what?
HOLMBERG: Oh, any crystal I could grow could be studied this way. For quite some
time we worked on single crystals of hydrogen peroxide. We always seemed to work
with chemicals that were nominally dangerous, but really weren't.
STOW: What has the impact of that work been?
HOLMBERG: Well, we tried to find the hydroxyl (OH) radical. We did not find it
definitively. But the search for the radical in hydrogen peroxide was a fascinating
experiment. We worked with hydrogen peroxide and deuterium peroxide, with deuterium
substituting for hydrogen.
STOW: I can tell you enjoyed that work because you light up as you talk about it. That's
great.
HOLMBERG: Yeah, I did.
STOW: Ellison, what about you -- what would your answer be to that question?
TA YLOR: Well, the most important scientific experiments that I had a part in were the
ones I did with Sheldon Datz on using molecular beams to study chemical reaction
mechanisms. That really revolutionized the study of chemical reactions. In fact, the
name of the field, which at the time was chemical kinetics, has now become chemical
dynamics. You can follow the utmost details of chemical reactions between gases by
this technique. If I had any success at all as an administrator, I would say that the most
important thing I think I know is that you do your best administration if you don't really
want to do it, if your heart is in something else. I think if you want to be in charge of
something, chemical research is not the thing you ought to be in charge of.
STOW: Well, there's some good philosophy for us to think about. Do either of you have
any little sideline stories you might want to pass on -- things I haven't asked you about
but that might be interesting as incidents that went on behind the scenes.
HOLMBERG: I have a little story about Ellison. It's really a story about my wife and
Ellison. It was when one of our small cutbacks was occurring at the Laboratory. Most
employees were a little bit worried about their jobs. My wife called me at work, but I
wasn't in my office. Henry Zeldes answered the phone and told my wife, "He's not here.
He's talking to Ellison." And, that response panicked her ...
TAYLOR: That must have been frightening.
HOLMBERG: I got home and she asked, "Well, what were you talking about?" And I
said, “Volleyball."
STOW: (laughs)
HOLMBERG: Ellison and I were co-members of a volleyball team, and we were
discussing strategy for the next game.
STOW: What year was this? Do you ...
TAYLOR: Oh, I don't know. Maybe '61, and that was one of the worst years for
downsizing. That's another reason why you shouldn't want to be an administrator -- at
least in an organization in which you don't really have any control over funding and size.
STOW: Well, what caused the downsizing in 1961?
TAYLOR: Well, I think that one was related to the loss of the Molten Salt Reactor. I could
be wrong on the date, but we had a big effort in molten salt chemistry to back up the
Molten Salt Reactor. Anyway, the chemistry funding got removed from that project or the
Aircraft Reactor Project, which led to the Molten Salt Reactor. But anyway, there were
two or three or four instances like that in which we suddenly had to drop a number of
people.
STOW: During the Molten Salt Reactor days, there was a good bit of work done in the
Metallurgy Division on development of high-temperature metals that would resist the
fluoride-bearing salts.
TAYLOR: Yes ...
STOW: What was the collaboration like between chemistry and metallurgy?
TA YLOR: Well, by that time, the chemical work relating to that was done in a separate
division. Because so much of the work was specialized, we decided it would be better to
have another division called the Reactor Chemistry Division.
STOW: All right.
TAYLOR: And so, the people in the Chemistry Division who had been working on molten
salt chemistry moved into the Reactor Chemistry Division. But this new divisionʼs
chemists had very close collaborations with metallurgists, particularly on "in pile
radiation studies." If you had a molten salt mixture you wanted to use as a solvent for
uranium in a reactor, you needed to study it in actual radiation fields to see how it would
react with various metals and alloys. The Reactor Chemistry Division and the Metallurgy
Division did this sort of thing jointly.
STOW: As we wind down here, let's step away from the work that either of you
specifically did in the Chemistry Division and look at the entire division. What would you
say were the two greatest accomplishments within the Chemistry Division during your
tenures here? Bob, do you have any insights on that?
HOLMBERG: Well, other than what Ellison as already mentioned, I worked with Kurt
Kraus and Ralph Livingston ... I also think we ought to mention Henri Levy and his
diffraction X-ray and neutron diffraction work.
TAYLOR: You know, Levyʼs work was one of the divisionʼs most solid accomplishments.
It has long had a continuing influence. Calculating the results of a diffraction experiment
is a monstrous task that is slow and tedious by hand. The calculation, when done by
computers with the proper program, goes pretty well. The Laboratory staff led by Levy
developed the best programs for helping researchers interpret their diffraction data. As
computers improved further, they were used for controlling diffraction apparatus. You
had to move the components of the apparatus around to pick up the reflections of X
rays or neutrons from various planes of the crystals you were looking at. And,
computers were an obvious way to do this. The programs that ran these computers
were developed at ORNL and distributed very widely. Another important thing I think we
did, mostly in house, was educational work in collaboration with what was first called the
Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies and later Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
We were able to bring university professors here for a year at a time to study some
particular field in which they were interested, such as diffraction or the use of carbon-14
in organic chemistry, for example. We would bring undergraduate students here for the
summer, so they could get some idea of what research was like in a large laboratory.
And, we would bring graduate students here to do research on materials that weren't
available elsewhere, or with equipment that wasn't available at their home university.
So, perhaps the most enduring result of the Laboratory's existence in terms of chemistry
has been its educational impact on institutions all over the country and all over the
world.
STOW: Well, there's certainly been an impact by the Chemistry Division and by both of
you fine gentlemen who've taken time out of your schedules to join us here today and
we want to thank you very much for coming here and spending some time looking back
in history. Thanks a lot, Ellison and Bob.
TAYLOR: Well, thank you very much for having us, and it was interesting to talk to you
about it.
HOLMBERG: Yes.
TAYLOR: What can you think of .... what else would you think of to ask me?
STOW: Ellison, when I look at your name, something in the back of my mind is
associated with some work that you did at one point on a "polywater doodle?" Can you
explain that to us?
TAYLOR: Okay, if I can stop laughing and crying. Well, if you want to know how this
came about, then Iʼll tell you, okay? Back in the early 1960s, a Russian in some little
place thought he had found a new form of water. If he would leave some fine capillary
tubing in a wet atmosphere, he'd later find little drops of liquid in the tubing. And, he
thought the drops had properties different from those of ordinary water. So, he took his
discovery to a famous Russian physical chemist in Moscow named Deryagin, who took
this idea and repeated this simple experiment. He found that, if you put this little
capillary tubing in a moist atmosphere, after a few days or a week or so, little drops of
water would condense in the tubing, except they didn't act like ordinary water. Their
viscosity was much higher. He'd measure that by blowing it along the tubing, back and
forth, measuring the dropsʼ flow rate. Also, the vapor pressure was different -- it wasn't
like ordinary water in evaporation rate. The freezing point and boiling point were
different from those of regular water. So, he started a big research program on this new
kind of water. He should have known better, but he got carried away. These findings
eventually got re-evaluated by some chemists in Great Britain. They found similar
differences in properties and some of them got all excited over their findings. Finally,
interest in the new water came to this country. It began to get popular attention in
publications such as the New York Times and Chemical and Engineering News.
Chemists started talking a lot about it. They asked, ʻWhat is this all about?' You must
have heard about it.
HOLMBERG: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
TAYLOR: Well, it struck me as obvious what it must be. I thought, "Well, it's obviously
just ordinary water that's condensing on little pieces of impurities -- maybe little crystals
of salt inside the tubing." And, that'll give you a solution that has properties different from
those of pure water. But since there was so much talk about the Russian work, I
thought, “Well, I'll try it -- if it is something new, it'd be interesting to know about it.” So, I
repeated this experiment, went away for a weekend, and came back to my little
capillary. I saw the tubing had some drops in it, and I experimented on them in the way
Deryagin did. But, I persuaded myself that this indeed was just a solution of little
impurities that happened to be in the tube. Now, Max Bredig and I had been talking
about the Russian work, and we agreed it was just crazy. If water solutions form like
this, why wasn't all water called "anomalous water," as this was first called? But then, in
Science magazine there appeared a big article by a well-respected spectroscopist who
had taken infrared spectra of little samples of supposed anamolous water and found
indeed it wasn't ordinary water. The authors called it "polywater" and offered theories as
to how it formed. Oh! Hurrah! We heard that all over the place. Well, Max and I decided
to get a little more serious about it. And Max started trying to repeat the spectroscopic
experiments. And, I wrote up what I had done and we submitted our paper to Science,
but our paper was rejected. The editors said they already had received some papers
that proved that polywater wasn't so. So, we forgot about it. But, the colloidal section of
the American Chemical Society had a meeting on the subject in Pennsylvania, and we
both went to it and listened to the authors of the papers. I presented our little paper and
came back. We discussed the ACS meeting and then presented a little seminar here
about the polywater controversy. Bobby Lyon, who was the editor of the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory Review, asked me to write a little article about it. So I did. After I
finished, I gave it to her and she noticed that I had titled the article “Two Years with the
Wrong Water." Because it had been about two years since I had started thinking about
this, and it obviously wasn't the water almost everybody else thought it was, I jokingly
based my title on an old country-like song called "Thirty Years with the Wrong Woman."
I thought "Two Years with the Wrong Water" would make a catchy title.
STOW: (laughs)
TAYLOR: But Bobby thought of a better one. She suggested the title "The Great
Polywater Doodle."
HOLMBERG: (laughs)
TAYLOR: Well, now, that's what I'm famous for at the Laboratory, I guess. I'll go down in
history as the man who wrote the article on "The Great Polywater Doodle." (laughter)
STOW: Well, your reputation is much more than just the Polywater Doodle fiasco. We
thank you guys today for coming over and spending time with us. You've made
significant major contributions to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and to the Chemistry
Division, more specifically. And, we thank you for taking the time to share some of those
historic thoughts with us.
TAYLOR: Well, thank you, and remind us not to fall off the step here when we get up.
STOW: I will do that.
HOLMBERG: I'll hold your hand.
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