My Grandfather's Connection to the Beginning of the Atomic Age

Seventy-five years ago today, December 2, 1942, at 3:25 p.m. under the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, the atomic age began with the first self-sustaining chain reaction.

My grandfather, Howard Bierly Matthews, was not a nuclear physicist, not even a scientist. He was an accountant. How boring. Or was it? Here is an excerpt from his autobiography:

"At the same time, the Physical Science Departments of the University were involved in the research called the Manhattan Project, which resulted, on December 2, 1942, in the first successful chain operation of an atomic "pile", located under the West Stands of Stagg Field, one block from my office. Involved in this project were such men as Nobel Prize winners Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi and James Franck. Everything was highly secret; some of these men didn't even use their own name on campus; they were renamed, like in this telegram which Fermi sent to Conant at Harvard to announce the successful pile reaction: "The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World."

My connection with the aforesaid was in providing space for what was going on and seeing that these areas were restored to their former condition when the project ended. (This included determining that the buildings were free of contamination. For this purpose, I had a team of scientists, headed by Professor Walter Bartky, on whose advise I relied.) Whole buildings had to be vacated [for the Manhattan Project], - Ryerson Physical Laboratory, the Mathematics Building, etc. and additional space had to be acquired in the Museum of Science & Industry, and the entire Armory on the edge of Washington Park was rented and altered for the Army Corps of Engineers.

The end/purpose of this was so secret that until the day of the first atomic reaction under the West Stands I did not know what that was, although I had been "cleared" of course and was issued the necessary ID badge. And when we rode the night train to Washington on matters of a secret nature we were not permitted to be in the same sleeper with Fermi and others for fear a slip of the tongue might identify him."

I can't remember how long ago I first read my grandfather's story. It evolved from the speeches he was sometimes asked to give because people found his story inspiring; he had gone from high school dropout, after the death of his father when he was 15, to university vice president at the age of 48.

Oh, how I wish I had know these stories and had the chance to ask him questions when he was alive!

A few years ago when the stash was uncovered in my step-mother's basement I found a cookbook put together by the ladies of the University of Chicago Settlement League. My grandmother was a member and apparently so was Mrs. Laura Fermi, wife of physicist Enrico Fermi. My eagle-eyed mother found four of Mrs. Fermi's recipes in the cookbook.

An obscure little piece of history to commemorate the beginnings of the nuclear age and my family's connection to it.