ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

Chemistry
Clip 4: - Atomic Bomb Tested and Used: When they exploded the fi rst one at Alma Gorda, New Mexico, and
it worked pretty much as they’d expected. It pulverized everything around. Then they passed around a questionnaire
at the laboratory there and asked us what we thought should be done. They had four…choices. A was
now that we have the bomb, drop it immediately on Japan. B was now that we have the bomb, drop it on an
uninhabited island and invite them to view. If they don’t surrender, drop it on Japan. C was now that we have
it, tell them, but don’t use it. D was now that we have it, don’t tell them. Don’t use it. Well of course, C and
D were, you know, ridiculous, but everybody that I asked, and I asked everybody that I could at the project…
voted for B: drop it on the uninhabited island, ‘cause we felt that that was the only right thing to do. Well, they
didn’t. They dropped the bomb without any warning on Hiroshima, and I think the fi rst bomb killed 30,000
people. And then two days, two or three days later before they even had a chance to fi gure out what happened,
they dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki, that killed 60,000. So the two together killed about 100,000 people,
those are killed, that’s not counting injured and the radiation damage which is apparently still prevalent in Japan.
Clip 5 - Trouble Finding Work: I expected to come back to Cleveland to go to work. One of the fi rst places
I went to was Standard Oil of Ohio. The research lab was on Cornell Road, up there by the Western Reserve,
and the lady there gave me a one page piece of paper to fi ll out on both sides and said she would put it in a fi le
and if an opening came, she would call me. Well, I went to every place that I could have been hired as a chemist,
and I couldn’t get any job…For no wage at all, there was nothing I could do and I was married at the time
so I ended up waiting tables for two years, which made me very angry, of course, and I want to also point out…
that in addition to working on the atom bomb, I also took courses at the University of Chicago, one given by
Enrico Fermi, you know, that won the Nobel Prize and everything, and he was the one that introduced me to
quantum mechanics, and in that way I had studied under Enrico Fermi, and I had taken several other courses…It
was very disgusting to have had that sort of exposure academically and to have had that work experience on the
atomic bomb and yet to not be able to get any job in chemistry at all when I returned.
Clip 6 - Earning his Ph.D.: What I did was, just to put it briefl y was that, people had thought there were only
two possible interactions of a gas with the surface of a solid. One would be a weak interaction, like the condensation
of steam on the bathroom mirror, which of course is so weak an interaction that it doesn’t change the
water at all, it just changes the spacing between them. When they’re in a liquid they’re much closer together
than when they were in a gas. So that was too weak to be important in catalysis. So the only other thing that
other people envisioned was the idea that there was an actual bond formed between this molecule from the gas
phase and that atom in the surface of the solid so that it was actually stuck on the catalyst. And so they would
generate, make the catalyst, expose it to the gas and then let it sit for, say an hour or something, then they would
evacuate the system to remove all the, what they call the physisorb species, these weakly bonded things, and
then study the ones that were strongly bonded. Well I…since as I’d said, I felt that they didn’t know what they
were doing. I was determined to see everything that happened from the moment any one molecule of this gas
got in contact with the surface. I wanted to try to see what it was doing. So I added a little tiny bits of gas and
then ran multiple spectra, and then add a little more, and twice as much, and keep adding more and more and
more until I would see the spectrum of gases…of the gas and then I would evacuate half and evacuate half and
evacuate half, running multiple spectra each time so that I had as complete a record of everything that transpired.
And what I found was that there were certain…bands that the spectrum gives you bands like this, like this, well
there were certain bands in the spectra that were readily removed by evacuation as if they would physisorb, the
weak thing, but the vibrational frequency was quite changed from that of the gaseous molecule, as if they were
chemisorbs, as if some more important, more signifi cant reaction had occurred. So I realized I was seeing quite
an anomaly, where it was looking like the two opposite things at the same time. And this of course intrigued me
and also made me realize that what I was seeing was exactly what you want for catalysis, for the molecule to
come from the gas phase, hit the surface, be changed, react, [and] jump right back off. And they had estimated
that the enzyme carbonic enhydrase is estimated at thirty million reactions per second, so that’s awful fast for
16