On December 16 of 1944, 71 years ago, a Typhoon formed near the Caroline Islands, which are east of the Philippines. The Navy’s Weather Central was monitoring the storm, and predicted it would move North. At the same time the 3rd Fleet, a collection of 7 fleet carriers, 6 light carriers, 8 battleships, 15 cruisers, and 50 destroyers under the command of Admiral Halsey, was about 300 miles off of Luzon. They were providing air support for the invasion of the Philippines. Halsey’s own meteorologist, using reports from pilots, predicted the storm would move northeast. Both predictions had the track a few hundred miles from the 3rd fleet.
The ships in the fleet burned through fuel at a remarkable rate. They were riding high in the ocean with low tanks on 17 December, and were attempting to refuel. The weather got rough, with high seas, and the tanker lines disconnecting and spilling fuel. Halsey decided to move the fleet due west, and then south, and wait until calm to refuel. If the storm had been moving mostly north this would have been a good plan. Unfortunately the charted path took them straight into the storm’s path. As dawn approached on 18 December, Halsey and his fleet encountered very serious storm conditions, and again turned the fleet south, this time at 15 knots. More meteorological estimations were gathered, and at dawn they attempted to refuel again. High winds and seas forced them to stop the attempt.
The storm strengthened, and Halsey ordered ships to hold their positions and let the storm pass. In the early afternoon Halsey issued a typhoon warning. By that time he had lost 3 destroyers (Hull, Monaghan, and Spence), and the rest of his ships were scattered over 3,000 square miles of the Pacific. The carrier Monterey was in flames from planes that crashed into bulkheads and set fuel on fire. 790 men were dead or missing, and another 80 injured. 150 aircraft were lost or destroyed. Seas reached 50-60 feet, and winds were at least 115 knots.
On 26 December a court of inquiry was held at Ulithi Lagoon (very close to where the storm formed). The court ruled there was no negligence, but that Admiral Halsey had made errors of judgment. This event led to changes in ship construction, improvements in weather reporting, and the use of naval aircraft to gather storm data. The typhoon was named Cobra naval meteorologists, and has come to be called Halsey’s Typhoon.
NOAA has archived the original weather maps from WWII–you can find the map for 18, December 1944 here
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
Oil tankers attempted to refuel ships, but the weather was too rough.
The USS Iowa in dry dock in San Francisco,
The fleet's ships, like the USS Cowpens shown here, rolled and pitched, causing them to take on water, and for planes aboard to be lost or damaged.
One of the ships caught the storm on its radar. It was only the second ever image of a typhoon on radar, so they didn't really know how to make use of it.
In 1943 a Naval engineer named Richard James was working to make new kinds of springs. There was a need to protect sensitive equipment from the motion on ships and boats. James had built springs of a number of different sizes and materials.
There is a term for the accidental quirks of historical discoveries and innovations. That term is serendipity.
One of the springs fell off a shelf or table, and sort of ‘walked’ down a series of surfaces. With some further modifications over the next year, James optimized the ability of this spring to sort of flow once set in motion. James’ wife Betty named the special spring The Slinky. They formed a company, borrowed $500, and made 400 units, setting the price at $1 each. They were unable to get stores to purchase them, but convinced the Gimbels department store in Philadelphia to let them demonstrate them. At the beginning of the holiday shopping season of 1945, the couple set up an inclined board in the store, and demonstrated the properties of the Slinky. All 400 of the original units were sold in an hour and a half. That makes The Slinky 70 years old this holiday season.
The vintage slinky came with instructions and ideas for how to play with the toy. From Wikimedia Commons
This is the original Slinky ad from 1946. From Wikimedia Commons
The Slinky was introduced to the national market at the American Toy Fair in 1946. James developed a factory and manufacturing process in upstate NY.
100 million Slinkies were made in the first two years of national marketing. The Slinky Dog, Slinky eyeglasses, and other Slinky products followed. So did marketing deals. Money flowed in, but James was not a great businessman, so debt mounted as well.
In 1960 Richard and Betty divorced, and Richard moved to Bolivia to become a missionary. He died there in 1974. Betty managed the company and moved its headquarters to Pennsylvania. In 1998 she sold the company and retired.
Betty died of congestive heart failure at age 90 in 2008.
Slinkies are used by educators everywhere to demonstrate wave and harmonic properties, including in workshops and lessons by the Education Department of The National WWII Museum.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
A good part of the development of aircraft in World War II was driven by advancements in the internal combustion engine in the two decades after World War I.
Engineers worked on plans and designs and working internal combustion engines throughout the 1800s, but that century was largely dominated by steam engines.
Steam engines use expanding water vapor to turn turbines, which were connected to mechanical devices to power trains, manufacturing machines, and other mechanical devices. Steam power is still used today in most electrical generating plants, which use nuclear power, coal, oil, or natural gas to make steam. Steam is also often used in large ships.
The internal combustion engine uses a controlled explosion in a chamber to create expanding gases, which move a piston in a cylinder. The first reliable internal combustion engines were designed by engineers (whose recognizable names included Diesel, Daimler, and Benz) in the 1880s. In the early 1900s automobiles became the focus of internal combustion engine development.
As the world powers on either side of the conflict began readying for World War II, pressure grew to devise engines powerful and light for aviation. The development of these engines took two basic paths—linear, liquid cooled engines like the Rolls Royce Merlin engine. Licensed to Packard, this engine powered the P-51 Mustang. The other path was air-cooled rotary engines.
Pratt & Whitney developed the Twin Wasp engine in 1930, and it powered the first trans-Pacific commercial flights when Pan American opened them in 1935. This engine had two rows of 7 cylinders each arranged in two rings. The first Twin Wasp had 800 hp, but later models had improvements that led to up to 1,200 hp. The Twin Wasp was used in the DC-3, its military counterpart the C-47 Skytrain, and the B-24 Liberator. Probably the most-produced large engine in history, about 173,000 Twin Wasps were made in the WWII era.
From the Twin Wasp Pratt & Whitney developed the Double Wasp, which had 18 cylinders and up to 2,400 hp. This engine was used in the F4U Corsair, the P-47 Thunderbolt, and the F6F Hellcat. During the war about 125,000 of these engines were produced.
To increase the power of an internal combustion engine, you can increase its displacement (the internal volume of the engine) by increasing the number of cylinders or the size of the cylinders. This is, for example, why you would expect more power from a car with an 8 cylinder 4.7 liter engine than one with a 4 cylinder 1.8 liter engine. Another way to increase the power from an engine is to more efficiently achieve combustion by coordinating the timing and volume of air (which contains the oxygen the explosion needs), fuel, and the spark which creates ignition.
Above 16,000 feet in altitude, air is thin enough that it is a challenge for internal combustion engines. Engineers matched this challenge by using technologies still used in internal combustion engines today—superchargers and turbosuperchargers.
Superchargers force air into the engine with a fan or turbine. A simple supercharger uses the engine to power the turbine by a belt or some other mechanism. A challenge for aviation supercharging is that a supercharger that works well at very high altitudes might blow out the engine by forcing in too much air at lower altitudes. Thus engineers used two-stage superchargers—a single supercharger to work all the time, and an additional one that the pilot switched on, or that automatically came on, at higher altitudes.
A turbocharger works similarly, but often more efficiently, by using exhaust to power a turbine. The supercharger takes some power away from the engine, while adding even more. A turbocharger works on waste energy and thus takes no power from the engine. Also, because the exhaust air is still expanding, it moves the turbine very effectively. A disadvantage of the turbocharger’s use in WWII aircraft were that it used a lot of tubing to capture exhaust and force air, and that the high temperatures of the exhaust on the turbine required special materials. There is also a lag between turbocharging effectiveness and need, since it uses exhaust.
Combinations of multistage supercharging and turbocharging were used in all American aircraft in WWII.
Jet and turboprop technology were under development during WWII. German aircraft using jet engines, and in mid-to-late 1944 British (Gloster Meteor) American (P-80) and German (eg. He 162, Me 262) planes were used. These planes were small in numbers and had limited impact on the war. The German V-1 also used a jet engine.
After the war jet and turboprop technology dominated military aircraft development.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
Images are from the collection of the National WWII Museum
The Grumman F6F Hellcat used a Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp engine.
A line of Vought F4U Corsairs rest on a carrier in the Pacific Ocean. The Corsair was powered by the Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp. There is a Corsair on exhibit in the U.S. Freedom Pavilion: Boeing Center at the NWWII Museum.
A B-24 Liberator, with 4 Twin Wasp engines flies on a mission. The NWWII Museum has a B-24 fuselage and an isolated Twin Wasp Engine on exhibit in the U.S. Freedom Pavilion: Boeing Center.
In WWII the war effort required EVERYONE’s help. My grandmother carried a soldering iron home from her job at General Dynamics. You’ve seen the pictures of Rosie and hundreds of other women doing hard manual labor on assembly lines. You’ve seen the pictures of women canning and working in Victory Gardens.
Women were at the forefront of computing and other parts of science in WWII as well. Most of the workers at Bletchley Park, where the Enigma Code was broken, were women. The first professional programmers hired by the US Government were all women. They programmed the ENIAC, which was being developed in WWII but wasn’t ready until it was used to make calculations for the H Bomb after the war.
Today we also need everyone to help solve society’s problems, and yet women are under-represented in the STEM workforce, STEM majors in college, and science and math electives in schools.
This Saturday we will host a workshop for girls, age 8-12. We’ll show that girls love great science education, and we will encourage them to consider careers in STEM.
In association with the Girl Scouts of East Louisiana, and Electric Girls, we are offering We Can Do It on Saturday Nov 7 2015. Girls will visit three sessions teaching fun hands-on science. They will make lip balm, ginger ale, electronics, and solve a (pretend) crime. Advance registration is required–fee is $5. Sign up here.
We need the next Joan Clark (codebreaker), Lise Meitner (discoverer of fission), and the next Grace Hopper (programmer) from this generation.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
In WWII Aircraft became a vital part of the machinery of war. In the 35 years between wars, technology of airplanes advanced quickly. One part of this was sophisticated electronics. Another was in the diversity of aircraft types for a wide range of functions.
The diversification of aircraft in World War II is a great case study in the scientific idea of Form and Function. A driver behind the development of all these different aircraft was engine technology.
Even though there are more than a dozen kinds of planes at the WWII AirPower Expo 2015, there are two basic types of plane engines. Two different aspects of engineering drove these two different types of engines–cooling, and air intake.
A linear style internal combustion engine, of the same basic design as in the automobiles of the time, powered the P-51 Mustang and P-40 Warhawk and P-39 Airacobra (and the P-38 Lightning, which will not be represented at the Expo). These V-12 engines were liquid-cooled, and powerful. The Allison V-1710 and related engines powered the P-40 series planes. Made by a division of General Motors, this engine had a displacement of 28 L and the initial versions had about 1,000 horsepower. The P-51 was driven by a licensed version of the Rolls Royce Merlin. Manufactured by Packard, the V-1650 in the P-51 was also a liquid-cooled V-12. This engine had a displacement of 27 L and about 1,400 horsepower.
All the rest of the planes used rotary, air-cooled engines. Pratt & Witney made 9-18 cylinder engines used in the B-24 Liberator, C-47 Skytrain, F4F Wildcat, B-17 Flying Fortress, C-45 Expeditor, A-26 Invader, and F4U Corsair. The Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp had 14 rotary cylinders in two rows of 7, and displaced 30 L, with a rating of between 800 and 1,350 horsepower, depending on the variant. Almost 175,000 Twin Wasps were built, as they powered the B-24, and C-47, two of the most built airplanes in WWII. Wright Aeronautical built rotary engines used in the B-25 Mitchell, B-29 Superfortress and SBD Dauntless.
The rotary, air-cooled engines had the advantage of not needing a separate cooling system, but the linear V-12 engines were easier to tool so that the propeller could be powered in either direction.
Both types of engines faced a challenge at high altitudes. It’s not just the crew that faces oxygen deficits in the thinning atmosphere. The combustion of fuel in the engine depends on oxygen in the air. All of these engines used either turbochargers or superchargers, or a combination of both, to increase engine power.
A supercharger uses a fan, powered by the engine, to force more air into the combustion chamber. A turbocharger (or turbosupercharger) uses engine exhaust to power the fan that drives air into the engine. Both technologies allowed engines to have more power at low altitudes, and to make functioning at higher altitudes more efficient.
The Museum has a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp engine on display in the US Freedom Pavilion: The Boeing Center. Two of those engines are also in the C-47 hanging in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion. Also in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion is a British Spitfire, which carries a Rolls Royce Merlin.
For more information about the WWII Airpower Expo 2015, where you can see all these of these engines working in flying planes, visit the Expo Site. At the Expo, our education booth will feature hands-on activities about the electronics that controlled these planes.
A view of a B-24 through the window of another B-24. Both are powered by Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp engines.
This is a good view of the 4 Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp engines on a B-24 over Europe.
These 9 C-47s in formation during training over Georgia are each powered by 2 Twin Wasp engines
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
Yesterday the winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine or physiology were announced. Sharing the prize were Drs William Campbell and Satoshi Omura, who together found drugs to treat parasitic diseases like river blindness, and Dr Youyou Tu who discovered a drug that fights malaria.
The earliest drug research teams, formed by German chemical companies in the late 1800s and early 1900s set up systems to screen chemicals for disease treatment with animal tests. They found some success with this model, discovering new forms of quinine (to treat malaria), sulfanomide (an antibacterial that saved many lives in WWII), and mepacrine (also used to treat malaria, under the trade name Atebrine in the US) and some other drugs as well. In England, researchers worked more on a model of learning about the biology of diseases, and then finding ways to stop important disease processes. In this way they discovered penicillin, which they took the US in 1942 to find a way to mass produce it for pharmaceutical use.
The Campbell-Omura team worked much like the German pharmacologists. Dr Omura isolated samples of bacteria from soils and looked for strains that grew well in the lab. He isolated chemicals they produced and shared them with Dr Campell. In his lab Cambell tested the chemicals on farm animals with parasitic infections. One chemical, Avermictin, was very effective at killing off the parasites. With some chemical modifications the drug was made more effective and renamed Ivermectin. It was eventually deemed so important that it is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. It is widely effective against parasitic roundworms and lice.
Dr Tu began the work for which she was awarded in the 1960s. Quinine and its derivatives were losing their effectiveness against the malaria parasite (a single-celled microorganism called Plasmodium falciparum) as the microbe evolved resistance to the drugs. Looking to traditional Chinese medicine, Tu and her colleagues began to look for chemicals in the plants and fungi used to treat diseases for centuries past.
Tea of sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua, a relative of the plant from which absinthe is extracted) was prescribed by traditional herbalists for treating malaria. Tu extracted many chemicals from many herbs, but an chemical she named Artemisinin was found very effective at killing the malarial parasite and clearing it from patients’ bodies. Unfortunately, the plasmodium has continued to evolve, and Artemisinin is now only an effective treatment when used with other drugs.
It is interesting that in over 100 years of research, the basic model for drug discovery has changed little. The three scientists who have won this year’s prize all lived through WWII, having all been born in 1930 or 1936. It is also disturbing that today we are struggling to find effective treatments for the diseases were worried would take the lives of soldiers 75 years ago, and that kill millions still today.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
Sweet wormwood being grown on a farm. Pharmaceutical companies are still looking for new uses of the plant, including chemotherapy.
Howard Florey, who developed penicillin, was born in Australia on September 24 1896.
Florey came to England to study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and received his BA and MA from Magdalen College before earning his PhD at Cambridge University. Later Florey was appointed a professorship in Pathology at Lincoln College, Oxford University, where he led a research team. In 1938, having read Alexander’s Fleming’s papers on the effects of Penicillium mold on bacterial growth, he decided to try to find extracts of the mold that might be used to treat infection. His team began experiments in mice with some success.
In 1941 his team used extracts of the fungus to treat a hospital patient’s severe infection caused by Staphylococcus and Streptococcus. The treatment proved effective–until they ran out of extract and the patient worsened and died. They continued their work but were still having trouble producing large quantities of the active chemical. With German bombing campaigns wreaking havoc on British infrastructure and economics, Florey and a colleague set off for the US. There they hoped to convince pharmaceutical companies to help them develop a process for producing large quantities of the chemical.
The development of penicillin was still slowed by technical problems. However, the War Production Board decided penicillin would be an important resource in the war effort, and in 1942 moved to get the USDA labs involved in production. The USDA scientists and engineers identified a potent strain of Penicillin, and chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau developed a large-scale process to grow the fungus and isolate the penicillin from the culture. In spring of 1944, just in time for the final planning of the Allied invasion of France, penicillin was available for treatment of soldiers.
Sulfa antibiotics were still the first line of defense against wound infections in WWII. Soldiers were all given a bandage kit with a packet of sulfa powder in it. Together, sulfa and penicillin saved millions of lives, as the mortality of the wounded was much lower in WWII than in WWI.
The American public had access to penicillin after the war, and this first fungal-based drug revolutionized medicine.
Howard Florey shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming. Chain was a Jewish German refugee who was the biochemist on Florey’s pathology team.
In 1945 Dorothy Hodgkin, a pioneer in the use of X-ray crystallography to identify the structure of biological molecules, described the structure of penicillin. This allowed later chemical synthesis of the molecule, and further development of antibiotics. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for her work in X-ray crystallography. In addition to penicillin, she described the structure of pepsin, vitamin B12, and insulin. She taught chemistry for many years–her most famous student was Margaret Thatcher.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
Howard Florey, Australian born scientist who studied at Oxford and Cambridge, led a pathology research team studying penicillin, and came to the US in 1941 to develop it as a drug. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Dorothy Hodgkin, an British citizen born in Cairo, was a pioneer of X-ray crystallography who won a Nobel Prize for her work in identifying the structures of biological molecules, including penicillin.
Margaret Rousseau was the
American chemical engineer who designed the production process and factory that made all the penicillin used in WWII.
Ernst Chain, a German born Jewish refugee, was the biochemist on Florey's Pathology team, and shared the 1945 Nobel Prize.
Having sent a uranium bomb to the Pacific Theater, tested a plutonium core at Trinity, and sent another plutonium core to the Pacific Theater, Los Alamos received the plutonium for another plutonium core. The plutonium was sent to the metallurgy group to be pressed into two hemispheres and nickel plated. The plan was to build another plutonium bomb to be delivered to the Pacific Theater for a bombing on August 17 or shortly after that. The announcement of Japan’s surrender on August 15 changed those plans.
The core stayed in the lab at Los Alamos, where it was to be studied to ascertain better ways to achieve critical mass. The idea was to make a core that was just 5% below critical mass and then put it inside a set of neutron reflectors. These neutron reflectors would decrease the mass necessary for criticality.
Harry Daghlian, a young graduate student from Purdue University, had joined Otto Frisch’s team at Los Alamos. This team was in charge of designing ways to assemble a core that would reach critical mass and explode. Plans to develop a more reliable and more powerful nuclear weapon were under way even before the use of the first two bombs.
On August 21, 1945, Daghlian was building a box of tungsten carbide bricks around the plutonium core when he accidentally dropped a ring right next to the core. This caused the core to go immediately supercritical. The response of the neutron detectors used in the investigation told what had happened, and he removed the bricks from around the spherical core. He prevented a worse disaster by his quick response, but suffered a fatal dose of radiation, estimated at 200 rad of neutron radiation and 110 rad of gamma radiation. He was taken to a hospital and isolated, dying 25 days later of radiation poisoning. This was the first known criticality accident, and little was known of the effects of acute radiation exposure. The only other staff member nearby was a security guard sitting about 4 m away. He died of acute myelogenous leukemia 33 years later.
On May 21, 1946, Louis Slotin and 7 other physicists were using the same core to test beryllium spheres as neutron deflectors. Slotin had an (unapproved) procedure where he lowered the top beryllium sphere onto the core while holding a screwdriver angled on the edge of the bottom reflector sphere to keep them from fully closing. He was leaving Los Alamos, and was showing his replacement the procedure when the screwdriver slipped, the spheres enclosed the plutonium core, and it went super-critical. Slotin flipped the top sphere off the core quickly, but not before receiving an estimated 1000 rad of neutron radiation and 114 rad of gamma radiation. The other 6 scientists were standing behind him, and so were mostly shielded by his body. Alvin Graves, who was closest to Slotin, received 166 rad of neutron and 26 rad of gamma radiation. Slotin died 9 days later of radiation poisoning. Graves, who was hospitalized for several weeks of treatment, left the hospital with neurological and vision problems. He died 19 years later, at the age of 53, of heart failure.
This plutonium core, the third ever made, was detonated during on of the Operation Crossroad tests on Bikini Atoll on July 1, 1946. It was detonated using two beryllium spheres just like Slotin and Graves were testing.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
Daghlian started his undergraduate studies at MIT before transferring to Purdue, where he got his bachelor's degree and began his PhD studies.
A reconstruction of the mechanism being tested when Slotin and Graves were exposed.
Graves died of a heart attack while skiing. He suffered from vision and other neurological problems after his acute radiation exposure.
Louis Slotin's Los Alamos ID. He normally wore jeans and a cowboy hat to the lab.
A reconstruction of the device Daghlian was using to test reflection of neutrons onto the plutonium core.
On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the bomb named ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima. On August 9, the Bockscar dropped ‘Fat Man’ on Nagasaki. ‘Little Boy’ was a uranium bomb, and ‘Fat Man’ was made with plutonium. Years of work to build the bombs and overcome technical difficulties in development and deployment had proceeded these missions. It was difficult, because of the amount of destruction, to quantify the casualties accurately, but estimates are about 140,000 in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
There have been many articles in the news recently, because of this 70th anniversary, and several prior SciTech Tuesday posts have discussed the Manhattan Project.
In this post I will focus on a few interesting points about the events surrounding the two bombings:
–When the first atomic test was made at Trinity, on July 16, ‘Little Boy’ was already aboard the USS Indianapolis on its way to Tinian. The test at Trinity was of a plutonium bomb like ‘Fat Man,’ so ‘Little Boy’ was the first detonation of a uranium bomb.
–Several B-29s had crashed and burned on the Tinian runway in the week before the Enola Gay was to carry its payload to Japan. As a precaution ‘Little Boy’ was not armed until the plane was in the air. On a B-29 crawling into the bomb bay and rewiring a bomb is not a trivial matter.
–Both ‘Little Boy’ (9700 lbs) and ‘Fat Man’ (10,800 lbs) were so heavy that they had their planes well overloaded.
–While the materials to assemble ‘Little Boy’ were carried by sea on the USS Indianapolis, the materials to assemble ‘Fat Man’ were transported by air in a C-54. There was spare plutonium in case a plane went down, but there was no extra uranium.
–Kokura escaped bombing twice. It was the backup target for the August 6 run, and the primary target for the August 9 run. On August 9 the weather report said there was too much smoke from a recent firebombing of a neighboring city for a visual target. The operational plans required visual targeting.
–The first bombing mission went off with no logistical problems. The Enola Gay left Tinian on time, met its companion planes on time, encountered no resistance, and missed the target by only about 100 feet. The second bombing mission had many problems. Its date had been moved up because of a series of bad storms predicted for the next week, but the Bockscar left late because of mechanical problems, and missed its rendezvous with some of its companions. With Kokura obscured by clouds and smoke, the Bockscar flew to Nagasaki and dropped the bomb, but missed its target, thus limiting the casualties from the bomb. The plane was critically low on fuel and had to make an emergency landing at Okinawa. The pilots had to spin the plane around to keep it from running off the end of the short runway there.
–After the bombings scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were split in their reactions. Some, like Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, and Linus Pauling, were moved to work against further use and development of nuclear weapons. Others continued to work in weapons development. Many were concerned about the results of unilateral power, and wanted to disseminate knowledge of the technology widely. It turned out that Soviets had spies in the Manhattan Project, and were able to launch their own nuclear weapons program beginning in 1945.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
The airport at Tinian from the air.
The view from a bomber over Tinian
The Enola Gay on the runway at Tinian
A Seabee working on the runway at Tinian as a B-29 lands.
Nagasaki after the bombing.
Hiroshima after the bombing.
all images from the collection of The National WWII Museum
Last Friday evening, the Museum hosted 27 wonderful teachers of 5th-8th grade students from across the country, and celebrated an incredible week of learning together.
For a week these teachers, from 15 states and the District of Columbia, from public and private schools, urban, suburban and rural schools, spent time learning about new ways of teaching science. At The National WWII museum we are committed to teaching science in the context of history. We believe that when students learn science in this way, with hands-on activities in context, they learn science better, and are more likely to maintain an interest in science.
With the support of The Northrop Grumman Foundation, these teachers came to The National WWII Museum to learn how necessity, knowledge, perseverance and skill lead to inventions, innovation, and careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), just like in World War II. They spent 3 days at the Museum, learning about radar, improvements in aeronautics, new materials, and other innovations of the time. They spent 2 days at the University of New Orleans, learning about current methods to study new materials in the Advanced Materials Research Institute.
When the school year starts, the teachers will lead their students in collecting weather data from today and seventy-five years ago. As part of the Citizen Meteorologist project, they will share data on our Real World Science site to see how weather might be changing over time.
