One hundred years ago today Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Austria to a Jewish family. She met Louis B. Meyer in London as he was about to return to the states by ship, and she was fleeing an abusive marriage for a new life in the New World. By the time she disembarked in New York, she was rechristened Hedy Lamarr, and had a contract with MGM. She came up with a patent in 1941 that might have changed the war–but was told she would better help the war effort by selling war bonds. That patent involved an invention so important to current technology that the Electronic Frontier Foundation recognized her with a Pioneer Award in 1997.
Hedy Lamarr in an MGM publicity photo from 1942. She was 28.
Lamarr avoided the movie star party scene, and preferred to spend her time at a drafting table and reviewing technical manuals. Inventing was her hobby, not martinis or late nights at clubs. Her first husband had been a military contractor who used her as an ornament at meetings and while wooing Fascist governments for contracts, so she had become literate about military hardware. In 1938 a story she read about people killed at sea by U-boats, she considered why the British and American Navy was so far behind the Germans. The answer was that our torpedos were inaccurate.
Lamarr had befriended a Hollywood composer with a genius for mechanics. George Antheil had been an avant garde composer, who in 1926 prepared a performance in Paris called the Ballet Mécanique. The composition featured an array of player pianos, accompanied by other instruments. Anthiel made piano rolls to control and synchronize all the pianos. Years later, Anthiel was making his living as a movie score composer, and was a neighbor who Lamarr met at dinner.
Together they considered the problem of the inaccurate torpedos. Perhaps, they thought, the torpedos could receive directional control from the submarines. But then, the pair considered, they would be open to jamming by the Germans. If radio waves were blasted nearby at the same frequency as the torpedo and sub used, there would be too much interference for communication to occur.
George Anthiel in his renegade composer days.
Lamarr suggested that the ship and torpedo could shift the frequencies they use sporadically, so that they couldn’t be jammed. The problem then would be how to arrange for the ship and the torpedo to both know when to change and what frequency to use. Anthiel had the solution–a template like the piano rolls he used to keep the array of pianos together in the Ballet Mécanique. In fact, the player pianos had 88 keys, and so he imagined 88 different frequencies that could be used. Together Lamarr and Anthiel submitted a patent application in 1941. The government considered it sensitive enough to not publish the patent details, but approved patent number 2,292,387 in 1942. The Navy though refused to consider a patent from a movie starlet and a composer, and it wasn’t until 1962 that they used frequency hopping to control weapons. Lamarr and Anthiel also created a plan for a proximity detonated bomb.
As I sit at my desk writing this post, I am responsible for a whole bunch of electromagnetic wave generation and reception. My cell phone is using WiFi, cellular and bluetooth, my laptop WiFi, bluetooth and some others, and my remote mouse bluetooth. The only way that this all can happen without (too much) interference is Lamarr and Anthiel’s way–frequency hopping. It is true that others had considered frequency hopping before Lamarr and Anthiel, but they provided a mechanism for sharing a key, and a model that others picked up later to develop radio communications technology.
A quote attributed to Lamarr suggests she felt some bitterness at the lack of recognition of herself as something other than an object of beauty: ” Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Next week we’ll return to the Manhattan Project.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum
The Manhattan Project, which was the US effort to build a nuclear bomb during World War II, was one of the largest and most expensive scientific endeavors ever undertaken.
Behind it all was the research of two women—without their important research the work to use and control atomic energy would never have been possible. Their work was the foundation of the Manhattan Project. Both of these women were born in the first week of November, and so we celebrate them today.
Marie Sklodowska was born November 7th 1867 in Poland, to a pair of poor schoolteacher parents. After studying at university in Warsaw she worked as a governess to support her sister’s studies in Paris, eventually earning enough to move to Paris herself. She studied chemistry at the University of Paris, where she met Pierre Curie, a young physicist who had discovered the piezoelectric effect. The two were married in 1895. They worked together in a shed on the campus of the University of Paris. Although Pierre was a professor, they university did not support their research—they funded their work with grants from industry. Marie Curie began a systematic search for elements that were radioactive, having discovered the properties first in samples of Uranium. In 1898 her husband abandoned his own research program to help with hers. Between 1898 and 1902 they published 32 papers, including the observation that radium exposure was more damaging to cancer cells than healthy cells. In 1903 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel, for the discovery of radioactivity. Marie was added to the award only after protest. The Curies used their share of the prize money to hire a research assistant, although they still didn’t have a proper lab. The University of Paris agreed to give Professor Curie (that’s Pierre, Marie was faculty because she was a woman) a lab, but it would not be ready until 1906. About the time that the lab was completed, Pierre was killed in a road accident (rain, horse-drawn wagon, fractured skull).
The Curies had a romantic and professional relationship.
Marie was devastated by his death. The University of Paris, in a remarkable change of direction, offered her the endowed chair it had established for Pierre. She accepted, and finally with resources to work, she forged ahead. The Pasteur Institute at the University of Paris soon opened a Radium Lab for her to lead. In 1910 she isolated the element Radium, and in 1911 she received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She remains one of only two people who have received two Nobels, and is the only person who received two Nobels for science.
During World War I Marie worked to support the French war effort, developing mobile radiography units to travel to the front. Under her direction, 4 more members of the Radium Institute won Nobel Prizes. This included her daughter Irene and son-in-law Frederic. More than science must have been passed down, this pair (named Joliot-Curie) had a long and successful career as spouses and colleagues.
Marie Curie died in 1934, of health problems probably caused by exposure to radiation. In 1995, the French Government, which up to then had an ambivalent attitude towards her, had never noted her war service, and abetted xenophobic talk about her, moved her tomb to the Pantheon, with Pierre beside her.
Lise Meitner at 18 in Vienna
Lise Meitner was also born on November 7th, but twelve years later and in Austria. Her family was large, middle class, and Jewish. She converted to Lutheranism as an adult in 1908.
In 1905 she received her PhD in Physics from the University of Vienna. Her studies were complicated by the restrictions placed on women at the University. She moved to Berlin and studied with Max Planck alongside Otto Hahn. In 1926 she was named Professor of Physics at the University of Berlin. She worked on the properties of radioactive isotopes at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In the 1930s, as her colleagues Fritz Haber and Leó Szilárd, and even her nephew Otto Frisch, escaped Germany, she remained in denial and focused on her work. The Anschluss changed all that, and she fled to Denmark, and then on to Sweden. She got away with no possessions, only a few marks and a diamond ring Hahn gave her in case she needed to bribe someone.
In Stockholm she worked in collaboration with Niels Bohr, and maintained regular correspondence with Hahn and the rest of her colleagues in Germany. Hahn and Fritz Strassman conducted an experiment in which they bombarded Uranium with neutrons. Confused by the results, and how to interpret them, he sent them by letter to Meitner. With her nephew Frisch, she interpreted the results as a splitting of the Uranium atom. She also recognized that Einstein’s famous relativity equation explained the great amount of energy released. In January and February of 1939 the reports of the Hahn-Strassman experiment and Meitner-Frisch interpretation were published.
Meitner and Otto Hahn had a complicated relationship–but never romantic
In 1945 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Otto Hahn for the discovery of fission in Uranium. The contributions of Meitner and Frisch were ignored.
She worked on the physics of radiation in Sweden until her retirement in 1960, when she moved to England. She died in Cambridge in 1968. Otto Frisch wrote for her headstone “Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.”
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum
Nobody ever saw that headline, but in a way it was true. 71 years ago Nazi troops landed in North America.
Weather Station Kurt, on display at the National War Museum of Canada, in Ottawa (from Wikipedia)
Northern Hemisphere weather generally moves from west to east. This gave the Allies an advantage in the war. In the absence of the satellites and ground radar we have now, observations stations and data collection in the provided the basis of weather prediction. Just as the Midwest and East Coast had more reliable weather predictions than the West Coast, the Allies had better predictions of conditions in the North Atlantic and the European Continent than the Germans had.
The Germans tried to solve this problem by establishing weather stations across the North Atlantic. They had stations in Greenland and on other islands, and sent specially equipped planes out to collect data too.
In mid-September of 1943 a U-Boat set out on its first voyage from a port on the coast of France. U-537 carried one of 26 automated weather stations made by Siemens. The weather station had two masts and 10 sealed cylinders. One mast held the one cylinder with instruments in it, and was 10 meters high. It was also the transmission antenna. The other mast had an anemometer and wind vane, The remaining 9 cylinders, and most of the mass of the station, was filled with nickel-cadmium batteries that powered the 150 Watt radio transmitter. The transmitter sent out a two minute signal every three hours. The station was code-named Kurt.
U-537 suffered significant storm damage that left unable to dive and unable to fire ammunition. In spite of this the captain successfully gothis ship to Newfoundland, which was then an independent country. They landed in Martin Bay, Labrador and set up the station. Part of the crew remained on board to work on repairs. After installing the station, the crew camouflaged it by strewing packs of American cigarettes about the site. Having repaired their vessel, they returned to France, expecting 6 months of use from the station before its batteries expired.
U-537 in St Martin’s Bay, Labrador (from the collection of the National World War II Museum).
U-867 had left port a month earlier, with a matching station also meant for deployment in North America. This ship, however, was sunk by bombs dropped by a British-manned B-24 off the coast of Norway.
Kurt was rediscovered by a Canadian geologist in 1977 while doing field studies. On its rediscovery its nature and significance was not really understood. At about the same time a retired Siemens engineer, in the process of writing a history of the company, found the log books of the meteorologist who was on the expedition to install Kurt. An expedition sent by the Canadian Department of National Defence found the station damaged but still standing in 1981. Kurt has been preserved in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum
In the past two weeks the news has been full of announcements of the 2014 Nobel Prizes. The efforts of the Allies to develop a nuclear bomb in the Tube Alloys and Manhattan Projects involved 21 Nobel Prize winners.
James Chadwick, a British scientist who spent World War I in an internment camp in Germany, led the Tube Alloys project, and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935 for his discovery of the neutron. Chadwick was born 20th of October in 1891.
Alfred Nobel was born 21st of October 1833. His parents were very poor, and of their 8 children only Alfred and three others survived to adulthood. Immanuel Nobel, Alfred’s father was an engineer in Stockholm, and the son learned a great deal about engineering and especially explosives from the father. The family owned a factory that produced armaments for the Crimean War, but which struggled to make money when the war ended. Alfred and one of his brothers took over the factory operations and made it profitable. Alfred Nobel invented the blasting cap in 1865, dynamite in 1867, and ballistitite (a forerunner of cordite) in 1887. The growth of family factories using their patents for explosives made Alfred and his family very rich.
In 1896, without his family’s knowledge, Alfred Nobel made a will assigning 94% of his assets (about 1.7 million pounds at the time) to a trust to give annual prizes in 5 areas. Three prizes were for science (Physical Science, Chemistry, and Medicine or Physiology), one for literature, and one that is now called the ‘Peace Prize.’ In his will Nobel said the prize ‘is to be given to the person or society that renders the greatest service to the cause of international fraternity, in the suppression or reduction of standing armies, or in the establishment or furtherance of peace congresses.’
Alfred Nobel’s intentions in establishing these awards has been a topic of speculation in the decades since his death in 1896. It might be that he felt guilty for the damage to individuals and societies caused by his inventions. A premature obituary read ‘Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.’ It might be that his only concern was his reputation, and the reputation of his family.
Today is Ada Lovelace day. Ada is honored with her own day for being the first software developer. She described algorithms and computers that were the basis for the Turing Machine used to crack the Enigma Code.
Augusta Ada Byron was born in 1815, the only child Lord Byron had by his wife Anne Isabelle Byron. In letters, Byron, who had expressed disappointment that his only legitimate offspring was not male, called her Ada. Byron and his wife
Ada Byron, about the age of her presentation at court, in her Austen phase.
separated a month after the child was born, and Ada never knew her father. He died when she was 8 years old and she was not allowed to see even a portrait of him until she was an adult.
Ada’s mother encouraged her to pursue mathematical and technical topics, to avoid her exhibiting any of Byron’s romantic instability. This encouragement occurred mostly at a distance, as Anne Isabelle preferred to leave her daughter’s actual care to relatives and tutors. She looked and acted the part of an Austen minor character—a pretty and smart young woman who fell for her tutor and was rescued from an inappropriate elopement. In spite of this, the young woman became popular at court, and Charles Babbage made of her a sort of apprentice.
Babbage had worked with John Herschel on astronomical calculations, and was frustrated by mathematical errors. He designed a “Difference Engine” that would calculate polynomial functions, and convinced the British Treasury to bankroll its development. The machine was never completed because of Babbage’s conflicts with the mechanic building it. Only a
In 2002 the Difference Engine was finally completed, using some of the parts abandoned in 1833.
small part was completed, although £17,500 had been spent to make it. Babbage used the completed portion to develop his ideas, and to teach students like Ada Byron.
Babbage had met Ada Byron at a party soon after her presentation at court, in 1832. He was impressed by her mathematical knowledge. Ten years later, she took the opportunity with the publication of her translation of an Italian article about the machine, to publish her notes on its use. Ada Byron suggested that the calculating machine could be used, with symbols, to work out logic, and not just calculations. Her notes on how this might work included algorithms that are now considered the first computer programs. In fact, Ada’s description of the use of a mechanical device that used symbols and algorithms to find solutions fairly accurately describes a Turing Machine. Because of this, her work is considered crucial to the effort to solve the Enigma Code about 100 years later.
Ada Lovelace, in her Thackeray phase.
Ada died in 1852, only 9 years after the publication of her Notes. Those years of her life were more a mixture of Dickens and Thackeray. She discovered that her close friend Medora Leigh (daughter of Lord Byron’s half sister from whom Ada took the name Augusta), was actually her half-sister (that’s the Dickens part). Ada Byron became Ada King in 1835 after marrying William King. They had 3 children (one named Byron), and when her husband became the Earl of Lovelace, she acquired the name under which she is still honored. She flirted and gambled her way through most of the 1840s, developing a mathematical model for casino betting with male compatriots. The venture went disastrously wrong, and ended in her owing thousands of pounds, and her having to admit all to her husband (that’s the Thackeray part). Her life was ended by overly enthusiastic physicians attempting to treat her uterine cancer with bloodletting.
Ada Lovelace day was founded, as was the Ada Initiative and other efforts, to recognize the past accomplishments of women in STEM, and to encourage current and future participation in STEM by women.
Also today, you can see the new Ask the Expert video to find out how planes fly (explained in less than 2 minutes).
You can view all the other videos, and ask your own questions, on our SciTech site.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Musuem
Imagine it is 1943, and you are a Danish professor, son of a Jewish mother, hiding with your wife in a potting shed in suburban Copenhagen near the harbor. It is September 29th, late summer in many places, but in Copenhagen it is definitely autumn. The cool dampness soaks through your clothes as you wait, each of you sitting on the one bag you were able to pack, until darkness falls and you can slip away to the harbor. Your six sons are still at home, unaware of the predicament the family is in.
The Germans have controlled Denmark since April of 1940, but Danish resistance has been strong. The Danes have managed to prevent the removal of the country’s 8000 Jews. Gradually the Germans tired of strikes and sabotage, and Hitler was not happy at the exemption of Danish Jews from the Final Solution. Months of bad news for the Axis increased the pressure on the Nazi forces, and they have re-occupied Copenhagen, confined the King, and ordered saboteurs to be shot immediately.
As the danger increased, you, as director of a research institute, worked to protect and smuggle out as many foreigners and people of Jewish descent as you could. The Germans have wanted to arrest you, but your international reputation makes you a catalyst for revolt. Nazi strategists decided that the best way to capture you would be as part of a general roundup.
Only this morning you heard from an infiltrator of Nazi headquarters that you were now the target of their attention. Thus your position between bags of bulbs and mulch in an outhouse growing colder by degrees as the sun sets. Your night will be more hazardous, wet and cold as you and your wife are loaded into a small motorboat, and then a fishing boat, by moonlight. Your captain avoids mines and patrols to take you across 25 miles of cold sea to Sweden. Your wife is by your side the whole way, but your sons are still behind, your liberators hoping to move them within the week.
This is the story of Niels Bohr, who was born on October 7th in 1885, in Copenhagen, Denmark and lived until November 18th, 1962. His parents were prominent citizens of the city—his father was a physiologist and his mother’s family was Jewish, and rich from banking. Bohr was given the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, for his elucidation of the structure and energy of atoms. His Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen brought together, as visitors and permanent members, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and other great minds. In 1939, in response to the discovery and mechanical explanation of fission, Bohr co-authored a theoretical paper, “The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission,” which set off the race to build the atomic bomb. In the 1930s Bohr worked to help scientists fleeing the Nazis. He arranged housing and jobs for them in Copenhagen while working with the Rockefeller Foundation to help them find jobs and settle away from danger. These scientists were at risk either because they were Jewish, or because they had opposed the rise of the Third Reich and its methods. Bohr found himself in occupied Denmark in 1940, having sent all the visiting scientists abroad before the invasion.
In Sweden, not controlled by the Germans, but pinned by their occupation of Norway and Denmark, the situation was tense. In spite of that, Bohr convinced the King to announce by radio that Sweden would offer asylum to Jewish refugees. In the following months more than 7,000 Jews fled Denmark for Sweden successfully, many along the same path Bohr took.
It’s hard to talk about modern chemistry without bringing up the name Bohr. Students are taught to write Bohr models of atoms, and taught the complementarity of particles and waves in atomic structure as a foundation of understanding chemical elements and how they interact. These ideas were an inspiration to Einstein.
Niels Bohr, James Franck, Albert Einstein, and Isidor Rabi
Less often do we hear about the complementarity of honor and empiricism, or the combination of brilliance and bravery. Many scientists worked to make the science of the Manhattan Project eventually successful, and many of them were characters. Niels Bohr had character.
Bohr’s sons got safely to Sweden, and most of them lived there with their mother for the remainder of the war. Bohr and his eldest son went to England, and traveled between there and the United States working on both countries effort to develop nuclear power. After the war he worked to form an international organization to monitor nuclear power and weapons development. He was a mentor to young physicists and quantum theorists like Richard Feynman.
Niels Bohr returned to Denmark following the war. When the King of Denmark conferred upon him the Order of the Elephant, an award normally given only to heads of state and royalty, Bohr designed his own coat of arms, which featured a yin-yang symbol and the Latin phrase contraria sunt complementa (opposites are complementary).
Bohr’s self-made family crest
Who was the first computer programmer? Tune in next week to find out.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Musuem
Some people can get away with anything. Including two physicists, refugees from Axis powers, working on research for the Manhattan project. Today if you built a reactor beneath a football field, or stacked blocks of Uranium until they were about to go critical, you’d get in trouble. Instead, these guys got scientific fame.
It may look like a mug shot, but it’s Otto Frisch’s ID badge for the Manhattan Project.
Otto Frisch was an Austrian of Jewish ancestry. His aunt was Lise Meitner (she will be the subject of a later post). In 1933 Frisch moved first to England and then Copenhagen, where he worked with Nils Bohr. For the winter holidays of 1938, Frisch visited his aunt Lise Meitner, in Sweden, where she was working. He was with her when she hypothesized that the results of an experiment conducted in Berlin, in which atoms of Uranium were bombarded with protons, showed the fission of the nucleus. When he returned to Copenhagen, Frisch replicated the experiment and verified the process of nuclear fission. In the summer of 1939 Frisch traveled to England for what he thought would be a short trip. Moved by the start of hostilities, he worked with Rudolf Peierls to lay out a theoretical process in which a bomb could be made from Uranium isotope 235. The resulting memorandum, called the Frisch-Peierls memorandum, was the basis of the British and American plans to build a nuclear bomb. In 1944 Frisch joined the Manhattan Project, working in Los Alamos, to determine the amount of Uranium-235 necessary to reach critical mass.
Frisch did this by stacking small rods of enriched Uranium hydride, and measuring the amount of released neutrons. Basically, it was a game of radioactive Lincoln logs. One day, he leaned over the stack of rods, and the detectors went crazy. Frisch quickly knocked the stack over with his hand, and the Uranium scattered around the room. His body had reflected the neutrons back onto the stack, and increased the rate of fission exponentially. If he had responded a couple of seconds later, he would have died, as would have many other scientists working in the building.
Eventually, the design of Little Boy, the bomb dropped over Hiroshima, was based on Frisch’s calculations of critical mass. He moved to England after the War, and lived to be 75 years old, so he did scatter the rods on time.
Not a mug shot–Enrico Fermi’s photo for his Manhattan Project ID badge.
Enrico Fermi’s dangerous experiment was bigger, and so is his fame. Fermi was an Italian scientist married to a Jewish woman, and so moved to the US in 1938. He was working for the Manhattan Project at the University of Columbia, trying to create a nuclear reactor, using bricks of Uranium oxide and blocks of graphite as a moderator. The reactors were important to create Plutonium, which some in the Manhattan Project favored over Uranium as the material for a nuclear bomb. When the government decided to set up the research on reactors in Chicago, Fermi and his team moved there. A large facility outside of the city was being constructed, since the dangers of the reactors were considerable. However, construction was slow and Fermi convince authorities he could safely build a reactor on a squash court under the football stadium. It took less than a month for him to build the reactor to reach critical stage. The reactor was quickly shut down and reconstructed at Argonne, outside the city. The reactors for the Manhattan Project at Hanford, WA, and Oak Ridge, TN were made under Fermi’s supervision.
Stacking Uranium rods in an open lab to calculate critical mass? Building the world’s first nuclear reactor under a university football stadium? Not things everyone could do and be famous instead of infamous. Yet these two immigrant-scientists led the way into the Manhattan Project with such risky empiricism.
This fall we will focus mostly on events and people in the Manhattan Project. The work to develop a bomb from fission began about 75 years ago, and really reached “critical mass” about 70 years ago. Next week’s post will focus on Nils Bohr.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
Have you noticed that your gin and tonic glows in the dark? Ever wondered why tonic water has that wonderfully bitter taste? Have you thought about how developing dyes led to medical advances? Curious what this has to do with World War II? Read on.
In 1940 one of the last remnants of the formerly powerful Dutch colonial system was the Kina Bureau, a cartel that monopolized quinine distillation. Quinine is an organic molecule that is extracted from the quina tree of South America. The Quecha people of the Andes cultivated the plant. They used it’s muscle relaxing properties to prevent shivering when they got cold. Jesuit missionaries noted that it also prevented malaria, and used it in their colonial missions. It was brought to Europe, called fever tree bark, in the early 17th century, and used in Spain and Italy where malaria was common. Peru and other countries began to try to control the seeds of the species of Cinchona that were medicinally useful shortly after that. However, merchants were successful at smuggling seeds and plant cuttings, and plantations were developed by the British in Sri Lanka, and by the Dutch in Indonesia in the 19th century. Scientists worked to synthesize the chemical in the lab throughout the 19th century, but were unsuccessful. Colonists were given a tincture of quinine in soda water to prevent malaria. Because the beverage had a bitter flavor there developed a habit of mixing it with something to mask the flavor—and thus the gin and tonic was born.
In the late 19th century and the turn of the 20th, German scientists were leaders in the use of coal tar to make synthetic dyes. Over the first 30 years of the 20th century they discovered that many of their dyes had medical uses (this was how sulpha drugs were discovered). The German industrial producer IG Farben synthesized a chemical they introduced as an alternative to quinine in the early 1930s. However, in addition to being less effective, this pill had terrible side effects including nausea.
That was the context when the Japanese took control of southeast Asia, and the Germans took over the Netherlands. As tensions were mounting, the Secretary of Commerce failed to purchase large quantities of quinine, in spite of being instructed to do so, because he felt the price was too high. When the allies deployed soldiers to the Pacific, the results were serious. One year after Pearl Harbor, 8500 soldiers were hospitalized with malaria, and 50-80% of soldiers in field hospitals were there for malaria. Atabrine was being distributed, but its side effects and a Japanese propaganda campaign made soldiers unwilling to use it. You’ve seen those posters to promote malaria prevention for soldiers? They were the result of Japanese radio propaganda telling servicemen that atabrine caused impotence.
The government moved to find quinine in South and Central America, where the Axis powers didn’t have control over the Cinchona’s native forests. Agreements were made for access to the forests, and government scientists went in search of plants with high quantities of quinine in their bark. These plants would be used to develop breeding stock for new plantations. In the meantime these wartime botanists collected Cinchona bark for distillation of quinine. Braving poor conditions, disease (including malaria!), and other hardships, up to 40 scientists with native support scoured tropical forests at high altitudes. Eventually they sent to the U.S. 12.5 million lbs of bark, but they never found a high-yield strain. Hybridization and local conditions seemed to control production of quinine in the plants more than genetics. In 1944 the synthesis of quinine was successfully achieved by American scientists. The synthesis is still very complicated and inefficient, and so was never brought to commercial production. Although great advances have been made in malaria treatment in the last decades, treatments are still not as good as the international malaria problem requires—and the plasmodium that causes malaria seems adept at evolving resistance to treatment.
So fill up that glass with tonic water before you sit out in the summer evening. But fill it up often. Today the FDA limit on quinine in tonic water is 83mg/l. You’ll need to drink 10 liters a day to get your medicinal dose.
And one more thing…
Quinine is highly fluorescent in a mild acid solution. So much so that it is used as an international standard in analytical chemistry. Since carbonated water is mildly acidic, your tonic drink will glow in a black light. That black light is less likely to attract mosquitoes as well.
A 19th Century illustration of a species of Cinchona. From Wikimedia Commons.
From the US Army Medical Dept's Office of Medical History
From the National Library of Medicine
This is the last post in a series on plant products in the war. Next week starts a run on the Manhattan Project and its scientists.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
Two plants and their products make up our second-to-last dispatch on the use of plant materials in World War II.
Hemp is a plant which today has something of a tarnished reputation. Because varieties of Cannabis sative are used for production of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) its cultivation has come under great scrutiny in this country over the last 50 or 60 years. Most varieties, including the tall ones grown for fiber, not only produce little THC, but other chemicals that would render the THC ineffective.
Hemp is one of the oldest cultivated plants, with evidence of its agricultural use going back to neolithic China (about 10,000 BCE). Its use spread across the old world, and while it may have gotten a boost from pseudo-pharmaceutical use, it was utilized as a fiber source for rough clothing and ropes, and the leaves often used in soups and stews. The seeds were used for oils. Colonists brought the plant to the new world, where it was used in much the same manner, and made up a large part of plantation production in the colonial states. Hemp’s use declined after the Civil War, and and world-wide dropped as other fibers, including synthetic materials, increased in the 20th century. In the early 1940s production of rope, cord, webbing and cloth increased, and the ability to trade overseas decreased. The US Department of Agriculture advocated for the cultivation of hemp to meet the increased demand for fiber. Many of the rougher parts of packs and bags were made with hemp in wartime, and much of the webbing and straps on packs and parachutes was also made with hemp.
Hemp is botanically in its own family, the Cannabaceae. The family is small, with hemp’s closest relative being Humulus lupulus, the hop, whose flower is used to flavor beer. The seeds of hemp have all essential amino acids, a rarity for plants, and so can be used as a protein supplement.
Another plant whose important product was in short supply in World War II is mahogany. Many of the boats used in the war, particularly those made by the Higgins company, like the landing craft and the PT boats, were made of wood. Metal was in short supply, and the tight window for ramping up production often demanded the use of already-present technologies and construction plans. The PT boats were 78 foot patrol vessels that helped the Navy recover from Pearl Harbor. Though they were small, they could be built quickly and used flexibly. The relatively small PT boats were used in coastal battles against German and Japanese ships. Higgins industries made about 200 PT boats, many of which went to Russian and British forces early in the war.
Higgins PT boats were made of mahogany. Mahogany comes from tropical trees in Central and South America. These are typically trees from Swietenia. The wood from these trees is the opposite of another tropical tree also used in the war effort—balsa. Mahogany is a dense hardwood with a fine and straight grain. Swietenia is threatened in its native range, and so logging it is now restricted. Most commercial mahogany today comes from plantations of Swietenia in Asia, or from related members of the family native to Asia. The mangrove is also in this family of trees.
The National WWII Museum has one of the original Higgins PT boats—PT 305. PT 305 served in the Mediterranean late in the war, and saw action against German forces there. After the war the boat was trimmed to be smaller and used to seed oyster beds. It was purchased in 2007 by the museum as a renovation project.
In the renovation of PT 305 we’ve learned much about the boat’s construction. Both the hull and the deck are made of two layers of mahogany planks set at cross-angles. In between the layers is a sheet of cotton ducking that is soaked in a polymer that never dries. The two layers of wood at angles strengthen the structure and allow it to withstand traveling at speed in rough seas. The cotton layer makes it waterproof.
Polymer seals the space between the planks and over the spots where fasteners are used.
The hull and keel are both two-layered with planking and duck between.
The mahogany deck has another layer of planking on the other side.
These two plants, mahogany and hemp, played an important role in winning the war. Their own history and botany bring an interesting twist to the roles they played in the technology of World War 2.
Next week’s post will be about rubber and the chemical revolution of polymers.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
One of the oldest domesticated plants is flax. It was probably domesticated in Mesopotamia, and was grown and used in Ancient Egypt. Today flax (Linum usitatissimum) is the rare plant that gets the hat-trick for utility—used in three very different ways to make important products. There are examples for two of those uses in World War. The third use is a relatively recent one.
One major theme in the story of World War II technology is the continued application of tools and processes that had already been used in the past. The war came on fast for the US, which had avoided it as long as possible, and for the UK, which didn’t foresee the rapid fall of France. Planes in World War I were wooden, covered with fabric. Some of the RAF’s earliest and most successful planes in World War II were also fabric covered. In the US cotton was relatively inexpensive, and available within its borders. In the UK there was no cotton production and transport overseas was problematic. Planes produced in Australia for the Pacific theater used cotton, but planes produced in England used linen covering. Linen is made from fibers in the flax plant.
Linen was produced in Northern Ireland and western Europe during in the early 1900’s. The German advance across the continent made most linen produced there unavailable. The Republic of Ireland began producing flax for production in the North. This linen was used to cover planes like the Hawker Hurricane and for the straps of parachutes and other parts of equipment. Linen stretches very little, even less than cotton, and is tough and weather resistant.
Eisenhower looking at rescued paintings–painted in linseed oil on flax canvases. From the National Archives.
Flax is also used for oil production. Oil paint was, and for art paints still is, based on linseed oil, which comes from flax seed. Those paintings of the masters, captured by the Germans and rescued by the Monuments Men, were made in linseed oil paints on linen canvases (cotton is common for canvases in the US, where linen is more expensive than in Europe).
Linseed oil, mixed with cork or wood fibers, was made into flooring (Linoleum) by British inventor Frederic Walton in 1855. Today what we call linoleum has no linseed oil in it, but is made of polyvinyl chloride from petroleum.
So flax is used for fiber in clothing and industry, and for oil in industry. The usitatissimum in its name means ‘most useful.’ What is the third use that gives it the hat trick?
Well you’ve guessed already. Flax oil is a hot nutritional and dietary product. The oil has omega 3 fatty acids, and lignan phytoestrogens believed to be healthful for heart and digestive diseases. The oil used for industry and nutrition are basically the same—cold pressed from the seed. Oil production for industry is often aided with chemical extraction using petrochemicals not safe for consumption.
Learn more about sciences during World War II in our upcoming lecture:
Ethnobotanist Dr. Mark Plotkin will be discussing the use of plant products like quinine and rubber, in WWII, at the Museum on Thursday, September 11th. For more information on this lecture, visit us here.
Check in next week to read about some plants that have been important for Home Front and war technologies, in honor of this event.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
