Morgan, Karl

              
ORAL HISTORY OF KARL Z. MORGAN
With wife Helen Morgan
Interviewed by Joan Carden
March 22, 1972
 
[Editor’s note: Poor recording quality renders much of this interview inaudible.]
Mrs. Carden: I’m interviewing Dr. Morgan. Dr. Morgan, would you please give us your full name and tell us something about your current job, and then we’ll backtrack.
Dr. Morgan: I’m Karl Morgan and I’m Director of the Health Physics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 
Mrs. Carden: Dr. Morgan, when did you come to Oak Ridge?
Dr. Morgan: I came to Oak Ridge in September of 1943, and my family joined me here a few months after that. We were in Chicago, at the University of Chicago, the Metallurgical or the Plutonium Project there.
Mrs. Carden: Where did you first stay when you came to Oak Ridge?
Dr. Morgan: I stayed at what was called the Guest House. It was just a big barn in those days and we slept in one big room that had about thirty cots, and each of us had three or four pairs of shoes we would have to clean in the evening because of the mud and pick up the pair of shoes that had been worn the farthest back and then get on the bus and go to work.
Mrs. Carden: The Guest House, is that currently the Alexander?
Dr. Morgan: Yes, it was redone and made into the Alexander.
Mrs. Carden: And your family came three months after you did?
Dr. Morgan: Two or three months afterwards, yes.
Mrs. Carden: Did they stay in the Guest House?
Dr. Morgan: No, I don’t believe they did. They stayed in Knoxville for a while, till our house was finished, and then came into Oak Ridge. Maple Lane is where we lived first.
Mrs. Carden: Tell us something about the house that you moved into on Maple Road.
Dr. Morgan: Well, they were just finishing up the houses there. They finished up a few houses in the central part of the city and a few out in the eastern part of the city, and the families moved in as fast as the houses were completed. A few were finished out on Outer Drive.
Mrs. Carden: What about transportation? Did you have a car?
Dr. Morgan: No, this, you remember, was during the War, and although we had cars, we didn’t have gasoline to operate them except for maybe one trip to the grocery store. So we all used buses to get around the place. You had the long stretch buses, which were common, or trailer buses, and the seats were around the side, a long continuous seat. And we sat there and sometimes we’d read going to work, other times we’d argue, but we didn’t mean any of it, and we’d sleep coming back. One day we’d go out and sometime in the morning it would be very wet and muddy, and coming back in the evening it would be dusty.
Mrs. Carden: I think that the roads were just masses of mud when it was muddy. Did you have trouble navigating?
Dr. Morgan: Oh, yes. We’d even get stuck up in the road sometimes between Oak Ridge and the Laboratory. In fact, where the old Cafeteria is located, it was later used as the [inaudible] facility [inaudible] part of the Laboratory, one day I heard a plaintive call from a young lady who was ahead of us crossing the road, and looked up, and she was stuck in the mud. At that time, they issued boots to everybody that worked at the Laboratory, women and men, and it was up to the top of her boots and she wasn’t able to move. So some us got contrite and got out to her and pulled her out, but her boots are still there. They’re buried under the highway, I guess, today.
All: [laughter]
Mrs. Carden: I’ve heard stories about the mud, but that’s the best that I’ve heard. [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Well, there was only one grocery store. It was at Jackson Square. And one drug store and one post office.
Mrs. Carden: In all of Oak Ridge?
Dr. Morgan: In all of Oak Ridge. And of course, during the War, if you wanted a pound of butter, your wife would stand in line for fifteen minutes.
Mrs. Carden: Fifteen minutes!
Dr. Morgan: It was only fifteen minutes and then maybe by the time she got to the counter, it would be sold out. And Oak Ridgers were discriminated against in those days when they went to Knoxville. We would go to Knoxville and they would be delighted, they’d get to the store where they had bacon; that was quite a treat. And they would stand in line for a long while and get up to the counter, and everyone in front of them would get their pound of bacon and get [inaudible]. And then after a few others would pass through the line, then they would find some more bacon. This was very common, so this did not endear some of us to Knoxville very much. We haven’t gotten over it yet.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: [inaudible] You can’t blame them for that.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: They regarded all of us as foreigners. Although many of us came from the South – I’m a Southerner – they thought all of us were Yankees.
All: [inaudible]
Mrs. Carden: What was the population of Oak Ridge? Was it seventy thousand?
Dr. Morgan: I guess in September, it was not quite that much, maybe around fifty, sixty thousand, but it must have gone up to close to a hundred thousand early in 1944.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]?
Dr. Morgan: [inaudible] in Gamble Valley, but see, that was only for the black people. [inaudible]
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: [inaudible]
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Mrs. Morgan: [inaudible]
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Mrs. Morgan: [inaudible] John works for – his ma owns a mill in Chicago and has business here in Oak Ridge [inaudible] and engineering and [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: Was he born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee?
Mrs. Morgan: Yes, he was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Mrs. Carden: Tell us a little bit about the hospital.
Dr. Morgan: I think it was government controlled.
Mrs. Morgan: Well, it was, but I had the one doctor, I think before Diana came, I think we had – [inaudible] you never knew what doctor you were going to have, but by the time she came – 
Mrs. Carden: Were there many doctors in Oak Ridge at the time?
Mrs. Morgan: I have no idea how many doctors we had.
Dr. Morgan: [inaudible] Army doctors in uniform [inaudible].
All: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: [inaudible] a lot of fun, but [inaudible] and you didn’t want to do it more than once. [inaudible] hospital, we had someone by the name of Helen Williams [inaudible] always laughing [inaudible] Dr. Stone, who was the Associate Director, and he organized a [inaudible] group in Oak Ridge. That was the first [inaudible] in Oak Ridge, and that was one of the few entertainments that they had besides the beer parlors and the bowling alley [inaudible].
Mrs. Morgan: [inaudible] party.
Dr. Morgan: [inaudible] organized the first [inaudible] in Oak Ridge, and there were churches of all denominations [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible] about the work that you did in the War effort [inaudible].
Dr. Morgan: When I was in the Health Physics Division, I was one of the organizers [inaudible]. It began at the University of Chicago, when Dr. Hoffman was director. There were only five people. E. O. Wollan was the first director of that group. He [inaudible] and became chairman of the Physics Division. He is still living in Oak Ridge. When I came to Oak Ridge, well, shortly afterward, I became Director of the division, and I’m still in that job. [inaudible] A number of the other health physicists are [inaudible] still working here. Many of those that we’ve trained have risen to important jobs and are leaders in the field in other laboratories and universities throughout the world. We have the [inaudible] Program organized. We not only had to develop instruments to measure and evaluate radioactive exposure, but we had to carry out research to find out some of the basic behavior of [inaudible]. In Applied Health Physics, we had many experiences with the old reactor, and this was the first case where large quantities of radioactive material were produced. I remember one experience, for example, we had just loaded on an Army truck the world’s largest shipment of radioactive material. It sounds funny today: it was only 200 Curies of barium-140. But compared to other sources, it was terrific, because the largest source anywhere else in the world was only 4, and this was 200 in one container. Of course, now, we have hundreds of thousands Curies in the containers. But anyway, we were quite uneasy about it. We had just gotten it loaded on the truck and Mark Murphy, who was one of the Laboratory directors, in Army uniform at that time, and of course people in Army uniforms aren’t told what to do, but he was sitting in the cab of the truck, he always smoked a pipe, and he took his pipe out and started beating it on the fender of the car to get the ashes out, and there was gasoline on the ground, and some of us, including myself, sort of grabbed his arm and told him, “You mustn’t do that.” Well, he tried to get some of us fired for telling a colonel what he could do and what he could not do. Fortunately, Dr. Whitaker, who was the director, came to our defense, and I’m still here. [laughter]
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: No, I don’t think that was any – at least on my part, it wasn’t any great concern. We had what I thought were very adequate and secure managers that would tend to prevent that. We had many more regulations, and we had inner fences as well as outer fences in those days at the Laboratory. And then to get in Oak Ridge, you remember, you had to pass through a guard gate. So farther than that, if you came across Solway Bridge, you had to go through a gate there and [inaudible]. And then over near the UT farm main facility, there was another [inaudible]. Then when you got to the Laboratory, there was another gate, and then if you got about midway, close to the present Cafeteria, you had to pass another set of guards. Then if you were going to the Reactor building, there were guards at all the doors. So at least those reactors were perhaps better protected than any [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Well, all of us, I guess, were [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Yes, initially, and even now in some places they make even more effort to develop an instrument [inaudible] setting the basic mechanism to detect the radiation of matter [inaudible]. We organized the first ecological research program in our country and our region. We have been doing [inaudible] chemistry for the Atomic Bomb [inaudible] Commission in Japan, studying the effects of radiation on the survivors of that bombing. We developed the method to destroy radioactive waste. The levels of waste that I decided upon in that period corresponded to the amount of radioactive material in [inaudible] Lake that was [inaudible]. Many of the engineers were proud of me and insisted that we keep [inaudible] Lake emptied into the Clinch River there would be dilution by a factor of a thousand, so they said I could use a hundred [inaudible]. But I persisted and used the lower figure. But the new level which the Atomic Energy Commission is projecting to use today is one millirem per year, which is one-thirty-sixth millionth of the level they wanted us to use in the early period. So conservatism pays off.
Mrs. Carden: Well, Dr. Morgan, [inaudible]?
Dr. Morgan: Well, some of the other things I did had to do with developing instruments to measure [inaudible]. I did some of the first, if not the first calculations on permissible concentrations of radioactive materials in air and water and in food and in [inaudible]. I organized the Health Physics Society and was its first president. We now have three thousand members in this country and Canada. A few years ago, I was the first president of the [inaudible] Association. They have something over six thousand members in fifty countries of the world. So from a small beginning in Chicago, [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Well, I guess over time that we had some concern, but with all the policemen around in Oak Ridge and at the Laboratory, I felt rather secure.
Mrs. Carden: Did you find it difficult to make friends, personal friends, being from out-of-town?
Dr. Morgan: No, I think it was easier to make friends then because everyone was suffering the same hardships and it was like being in the boat together. We were trying to make the best of a difficult situation, and we laughed at the mud and the rain and the dust and dried off and the deprivation and the lack of things we wanted. We didn’t have gas and the kind of food we wanted. We didn’t have airplanes we could go places. If we went anywhere, we had to go out to the river and the train would stop on the tracks and you’d get on the train and then you could go to Chicago or New York. But that was an all-night and almost a full day’s trip to Chicago, for example.
Mrs. Carden: Did you [inaudible]?
Dr. Morgan: Yes, during the early period, the Laboratory was operated by the University of Chicago, so I had to get on the train and go to Chicago about once a month. That wasn’t a trip to look forward to. The only choice was whether you would go on Illinois or Southern, and it was the question of which was the worst.
Mrs. Carden: Where did you catch the train?
Unidentified man: Out at Edgemoor.
Dr. Morgan: That’s just below the bridge, just above the present power plant.
Mrs. Carden: Did they not have a station?
Dr. Morgan: Well, we could go into Knoxville, or we could go over near – Lake City was another possibility, and it was possible sometimes to get the train to Clinton if the schedule was [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: If we would phone ahead, we could get them to stop down on the track on the river.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Yes, there was always excitement of some sort. There was apprehension on the part of many of us, because we knew the potential of the weapons that we were producing. We weren’t as dumb as the newspapers made out, that we didn’t know what we were making. We all knew that we were – at the Laboratory – most everyone knew we were making materials and doing research that had to do with weapons, and we knew that the first development, the important discoveries, had been made in Germany some two years ahead, about 1939, 1940, [Otto] Hahn and [Fritz] Strassmann and [Lise] Meitner discovered fissioning of uranium, which of course is the heart of the weapon. So many of us were convinced that Hitler and his scientists and engineers were trying to develop a weapon, and someday we would be listening on the radio to New York and the station would go dead and New York was gone, and we’d try other places – Chicago was gone. This is what we were afraid of. So although many of us wanted the weapon to be used in demonstration on an island off of Japan, we were very worried that the first demonstration might be in our country [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: [inaudible]
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: The research? Well I think we were [inaudible] the way things worked out, it was more by chance and by luck [inaudible] that we succeeded [inaudible]. We normally would not run the risk of it during the war. [inaudible] the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and our Graphite Reactor were supposed to be demonstration facilities for the big plant we were building at Hanford. So before they finished building the facilities here, they were already building our reactors at Hanford, and they built into them [inaudible] reactivity, so that it would override the xenon-135, which was a poison that drove in the uranium, and if DuPont hadn’t insisted on building the reactor just a little bit larger to override this xenon, the plants out at Hanford would have been a failure. If they had shut them down, they wouldn’t be able to start them up again for quite a number of days. So there were a number of things like that that happened that it was just good fortune that made it work.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: I think so, even though the so-called Wigner Effect that Dr. Eugene Wigner had theoretically predicted it, we’ve never had an accident of that type in this country, and the first and only big reactor accident was at Windscale, England, [inaudible]. So we discovered the causes and things that lead to accidents and [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: Well, Dr. Morgan, you were involved with the [inaudible] Program. [inaudible] about producing the bomb?
Dr. Morgan: Yes and no. If I’d had my say or had any control over it, I would have certainly produced the bomb because I was convinced that Hitler was far ahead of us, and as I saw it, it was a question either we would stop Hitler or he would end us. [inaudible] at the time, though, I had different feelings on it. My own feelings were that the government [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Yes, there had been the Trinity Test in Los Alamos shortly before the weapons were used in Japan, and so we knew they would work, and we knew the destruction they caused. The first weapons, you know, caused [inaudible], the equivalent of about twenty thousand tons of TNT. This would be a very small [inaudible] today, but then, it was great.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Yes, I do [inaudible]. We have accomplished quite a victory this quarter of a century or more. My own personal efforts in the past ten years has been directed in considerable measure to reducing medical exposure. And others in the Laboratory have engaged in endeavors that don’t relate necessarily directly to the program at the Laboratory. They’re tackling the big problems, the national problems. As you probably know, more than ninety-five percent of the population’s exposure from manmade sources comes from medical diagnosis. With very little effort, we can reduce this exposure to less than ten percent of the present value. If we want to reduce population exposure [inaudible] and [inaudible] damage, the malignancies that result in [inaudible], well this is where I believe you could be doing it, limit unnecessary medical experiments.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Yes, I retire in September.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: I’ve accepted a professorship at Georgia Tech and I will be leaving here and buying a home there in a few weeks when we move to Atlanta in the Fall. 
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Well, this is one of the sad things about life, you have to part from some of your closest friends, but then you have the joy of making new acquaintances. 
Mrs. Carden: Dr. Morgan, as you go to your new job, will you be coming back up to see your [inaudible].
Dr. Morgan: Oh yes. I don’t think one could keep us away. We’ll be coming back frequently.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible] Mrs. Morgan what do you plan to do when you leave Oak Ridge now that the children are grown? Just take care of Dr. Morgan?
Mrs. Morgan: [inaudible]
Mrs. Carden: That’s right.
Mrs. Morgan: [inaudible] We’ll be coming up this way fairly often, [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: Well, Dr. Morgan, we certainly thank you for letting us talk with you. The Oak Ridge Historical Society will appreciate this very much. Like we said earlier, we’re looking forward to our grandchildren hearing these things, because they have no idea how society was in the early days. And your contribution, like you said, from five men to many hundreds of people [inaudible].
Dr. Morgan: It’s been a real opportunity to work in Oak Ridge for this period. We began with many challenges and many uncertainties. When I went to Chicago – well, before that, I’d been a cosmic ray physicist, working on mountain tops and in caves and that was the only qualification I had for working with radiation. I knew what cosmic rays were, knew what radiation was and how to measure it. And I’d worked with Dr. Compton, Arthur Compton’s laboratory out in Denver. So he and his associates told me to come to Chicago – there was something interesting. They could not tell me what it was, but they were sure I would like it. When I walked in, I asked them where would I be working, and they said, “You’ll be in Health Physics.” I said, “What is that?” “Well,” they said, “you’ll have to make it.” And then I was reminded that at that time in the entire world there was about two pounds of radium. If you had some way to get it all together from all the hospitals and universities, the laboratories, it would amount to about two pounds. It was very heavy, radium; it would be about the size of a golf ball. And yet with this amount of radium, well, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people had been injured, and many have died just getting a millionth of a gram of it into your system. And we realized – I was told at that point that in a single pile, as we called them in those days, a nuclear reactor, there would be radiation equivalent – not to all the radium in the world, two pounds – but equivalent to thousands of tons of radium. In other words, it would take many thousands of tons of radium to duplicate the radiation. So many asked the question: is it worth the risk? Can you build nuclear power plants without killing tens of thousands of people? Well, that was our job, to see if you could. And the nuclear energy industry has become one of the safest of all modern industries, which indicates what man can do if he works hard enough at it.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Well, I think your organization should be congratulated for compiling these records. I wish that someone had spurred us on to preserve some of our old instruments that we made in those days. I’ve tried to locate them, but they’re lost forever.
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: One of our early instruments we called a paint pail because it was just built inside of a paint pail, and that was the name at one time.
Mrs. Carden: What did you make it for?
Dr. Morgan: Well just [inaudible]. We carried around this paint pail. We had to make our own instruments; we couldn’t buy them. Of course, they weren’t available then. Only a few people like myself knew what a Geiger counter was. I guess I built the first Geiger counter in this part of the world because I was familiar with it. One of the first instruments that we had was called Pluto, and we called it Pluto, but then Security jumped down our throats and said, “You can’t do that because Pluto sounds like plutonium, and that’s a classified word.” Then we had to change it to Snoopy.
Mrs. Carden: It was before its time.
Dr. Morgan: That’s right.
Mrs. Carden: Is your doctorate in Physics?
Dr. Morgan: Yes.
Mrs. Carden: How did you become interested in radiation?
Dr. Morgan: Well my teachers at Duke University was [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: Yes, as you know, when you are working toward a degree, at some point you have to make up your mind what you’re going to work on, and I thought cosmic rays sounded interesting. It provides some travel and experience. So that meant early explorations in cosmic rays and then eventually indirectly becoming a [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible]
Dr. Morgan: I had some part in that. George Parker was one of the principle ones. He and Paul Hopkinson wanted an instrument that was like a pistol. And working with them and a fellow by the name of Grant who was – I forget his first name – was the first director of the Instrument Division at the Laboratory, developed the [inaudible]. We got an old pistol handle and put it on one of our meters, and that was the first [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: Nothing could replace that paint pail.
Dr. Morgan: No, that and then we had the whole [inaudible] and electroscopes that were good. Then I built what we called “Chang and Eng.” Chang and Eng, you know, were the two Siamese twins, which were very famous in the early period, and “Chang and Eng” consisted of two cylindrical chambers that were attached together right here. And this is what we used to measure fast neutron [contribution].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible] instruments, but they did work.
Dr. Morgan: They worked. They were hard to operate and you had to know what you were doing. It was quite a skill to climb down a ladder in the cell with a large electroscope in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and holding onto the watch by your feet as you tried to balance yourself going down the ladder. [inaudible] fibers that moved across the scale. So you had to have a stopwatch as well as the [inaudible]. And in many of those cells, [inaudible] you had to carry your flashlight to see where you were going. But in spite of all that, we were very fortunate; we did not have any serious accidents at our laboratory.
Mrs. Carden: How did you find the men to work with, Dr. Morgan, [inaudible]?
Dr. Morgan: We just beat the bushes and got fellows that had some physics and engineering and biology and mathematics primarily, and we trained them. I held regular classes, telling them what an electron was and a little bit about circuitry and dosimetry and radiation risks. One of our big problems, though, was these scientists who thought they knew everything and did not have to obey the rules. We almost had a catastrophe once in the old Graphite Reactor building. When something would go wrong or when there was a danger, when you were pulling plugs out of the reactor, we would put a yellow rope with signs on it: keep out, no entrance, no admittance except by Health Physics. Well, Dr. Whittaker, who was the director of the Laboratory, had some very distinguished visitors with him one day. He brought them into the Reactor building, he ignored the signs, he walked right on through and went up on the platform on the west side, about what was referred to as the W-hole, a W-tank, a water tank is what it referred to. Normally it was filled with water, which would act as a shield to keep the neutrons out, but that day it was drained so the neutrons could get out and get this new equipment that was measuring something. And they just walked right by it. If they had stood there for fifteen minutes, they all would have been killed. They got high doses, but not enough, hopefully not enough to hurt them. But it was just fortunate that nothing serious happened. Perhaps this is one of the best things that ever happened for our Health Physics Program. After that, when I put up a sign, people had to obey it. And if the chemists insisted on letting too much radio iodine get out in the laboratory and I complained and he did not take heed, well, the Laboratory would notify him, “Well, maybe we can get along without you if you can’t work safely.” So from that time on, the experience with the director, we weren’t policemen, but at least they listened to us [inaudible].
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible] warnings [inaudible].
Dr. Morgan: [inaudible]
Mrs. Carden: Currently in colleges and universities, one can elect to major in Health Physics?
Dr. Morgan: There are several universities and colleges now where you can elect to major in Health Physics. Some of them have departments of Health Physics. But I’ve discouraged that until recently. I’ve tried first during the past several decades, primarily, to train the graduate program – to train students in graduate work in Health Physics. So I was initially responsible for setting up these graduate training programs. Herb Roth and I, after we’d had the local programs for years, went to a number of universities and got the programs started at different places. Something like a thousand of these students have gotten their advanced degrees, their Master’s and their Doctor’s degrees in this profession, through these efforts. 
Mrs. Carden: Dr. Morgan, you certainly have contributed much more to the [inaudible] than I realized. This is really good to know. Because of your efforts, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a great place to work.
Dr. Morgan: Well, we hope it stays. We do some stupid things sometimes, but we’ve been uniquely fortunate, I think, and our division especially has been fortunate in getting many good men. The young man that’s taking my place when I leave this fall is John Auxier, and he was one of our trainees that took his early training at Vanderbilt University where we had set up a graduate program. And he’s just completed his doctorate at Georgia Tech. And I’m on his graduate committee and he’s done an excellent job there. He’ll get his doctorate from there shortly. 
Mrs. Carden: [inaudible] you’re leaving your division in good hands.
Dr. Morgan: I think so. [inaudible]
Mrs. Carden: Well, Dr. Morgan, thank you very much for giving us this time. The Society really does appreciate it. When you come back to Oak Ridge, if you stop in at the library, you can listen to some of this tape.
Dr. Morgan: I’ll do that.
[end of recording]