There’s a lot about Teresa Waldof’s grandfather, Harley Wilhelm, that she didn’t always know or more fully understand — including his humility and his role in helping to create the first nuclear weapons.
The United States invented nuclear weapons through the secretive Manhattan Project during World War II — first trying to beat Nazi Germany to the technology, and then after Germany’s defeat and the first successful nuclear test in New Mexico, using the new weapons against Japan in a bid to force the nation’s surrender in the war.
Long before he helped lead a key breakthrough in the Manhattan Project that made nuclear weapons possible, Waldof said her grandfather was a farmer’s son born outside Ellston — the first in his family to graduate from high school — and a basketball star when the game was still new.
She never really knew what he had gone to work on, but that started to change after a building on Iowa State University’s campus was named after her “grandpappy” Wilhelm in 1985.
She’s finally getting to publish a book on her grandfather’s life and on Monday is giving a free lecture about it on campus. The book is titled, “Wilhelm’s Way: The Inspiring Story of the ISU Chemist Who Saved the Manhattan Project” and the lecture is set for 6 p.m. in the Sun Room of Memorial Union.
Her talk will also be livestreamed and a recording available within a day or two. More information is available at news.iastate.edu/news/2022/02/28/ames-project.
‘Shark at math and basketball’
Born in 1900, Waldof said Wilhelm was a phenomenal basketball player by the time he was 14 years old, sometimes scoring every point in a game.
A mentor encouraged him to pursue mathematics and science in high school, but he had no plans to go to college.
However, his basketball prowess and strong performance on entrance exams earned him what was known then as an “athletic loan” to be able to afford to go to Drake University, where he majored in math but also studied chemistry and physics.
Waldof said a professor described Wilhelm as a “‘shark at math and basketball.’”
However, she said her grandfather was humble. In one example, newspapers at the time credited players other than Wilhelm for some big shots, but he was not the one to say anything to correct the misattribution because all that mattered was that his teammates knew the truth and any basket helps win the game.
After graduation, he became a high school teacher and basketball coach in Mapleton and Guthrie Center, taking some time in between for graduate school in chemistry at Drake before he ran out of money.
He then took a college basketball and football coaching job in Montana, but it didn’t go well, so he moved back to Iowa for a doctorate program in chemistry at Iowa State, coming to the university in 1928.
Pure uranium
Outside Wilhelm Hall on campus, there’s a plaque commemorating the 1942 discovery led by Frank Spedding and Wilhelm of the process to produce the highly pure uranium needed for the Manhattan Project.
At that point, Waldof said purified uranium could exist as a powder, but no one had come up with a way to create much larger, more solid quantities.
Spedding, who was head of physical chemistry at Iowa State and Wilhelm’s boss at the time, had been recruited into the Manhattan Project and attended secret meetings in Chicago in February 1942. At that time, the weapons development program needed 12,000 pounds of pure uranium by that December to prove in an experiment that a controlled nuclear chain reaction was possible.
Fission nuclear weapons such as those dropped in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan are powered by the split of structurally-unstable atoms of certain elements — uranium, or plutonium in the case of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki — into smaller pieces. The split releases energy that causes other atoms of the same element packed around it to split, releasing more energy, and so on — a chain reaction induced by the creation of a critical mass of nuclear material.
Waldof said others in the Manhattan Project had been tasked with figuring out ways to create solid-form pure uranium, but there were doubts that enough material could be gathered in time for the experiment.
With those doubts, the team in Ames led by Wilhelm under Spedding, was assigned to find a substitute for pure uranium. But Wilhelm decided to also try to figure out a purification process, and he was successful with what was dubbed “the Ames process.”
The Ames team at Iowa State went on to produce more than 1,000 tons of uranium for the Manhattan Project, according to a news release from the university.
Chain reactions
The controlled chain reaction experiment on Dec. 2, 1942 — headed by Enrico Fermi, inside a tent on a squash court under the stands of an abandoned football field at the University of Chicago — was also successful, ushering in the possibilities of nuclear energy for making electricity and for making bombs.
Under the military leadership of U.S. Army Col. Leslie R. Groves and civilian scientist Robert Oppenheimer, the designs for the first bombs were then crafted.
At Hiroshima, the bomb named “Little Boy” used conventional high explosives to shoot one mass of uranium down a gun barrel at another to trigger a fission reaction. The detonation consisted of only three pounds of uranium out of the 100 pounds in the bomb and the rest was scattered by the explosion, releasing the equivalent energy of about 30 million pounds of TNT at once.
The fireball, blast and radiation released over the city on Aug. 6, 1945 killed some 70,000 people immediately, according to the account of the U.S. National Archives. Perhaps as many as 130,000 more people died in the coming months and years — from their injuries, radiation poisoning, cancer and other long-term effects.
Japan surrendered on Aug. 14 and World War II was over after the U.S. on Aug. 9 dropped a second, more powerful atomic bomb of a different design on the city of Nagasaki — killing 40,000 people immediately and as many as 140,000 within five years.
Living with history
Waldof doesn’t really know what her grandfather thought of not only the bombings in Japan but all the nuclear weapons development since.
He wrote a few short bios about his life and childhood, three or four pages each. He also wrote a short descriptive essay of the founding of Ames Laboratory — where, after the war, he went on to be the first deputy director and retired in 1971 — and the Manhattan Project. Much of her research for the book has been through archives.
She does think the end of the war gave him pride, “but it wasn’t really talked about or bragged about.”
A neighbor’s son across the street died in the Battle of the Bulge against Nazi Germany on Wilhelm’s son’s 17th birthday.
“The people living through that time knew people who were dying in the war, and they wanted the war to end, and the work that Wilhelm did brought about a swift and decisive end to the war,” Waldof said.
She does, however, know something of her grandfather’s perspectives. In 1955, Wilhelm presented his purification process before a conference in Switzerland on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, so the rest of the world could share in the knowledge for purposes such as nuclear-powered electricity and medicine.
In 1987, he also said — reflecting on the competition the U.S. believed it was in with the Nazis during the war to build an atomic bomb — “Now we find ourselves in a race. Who’s going to get it first?” He mentioned Germany, Italy and Japan, all aligned in World War II — and Russia.
“‘Where would we be today if Russia had gotten the atomic bomb first? We’d probably be worse off then than if Germany had gotten it first,’” he said.
Whenever nuclear tensions arise with any nation, Waldof said of her own thoughts on her grandfather’s legacy that, “in retrospect, the biggest deterrent to the use of atomic weapons is the fact that they were used and we know what comes from that.”
Waldof said Wilhelm developed bladder cancer at the age of 90 — one of his children also developed it within six months of him — and Wilhelm died at the age of 95 in 1995.
She doesn’t know how much he and fellow researchers during the 1940s understood the risks of radiation, but in addition to uranium, they worked with a host of other radioactive and toxic metals, and his family was exposed to uranium dust on his clothing that he brought home.
“It’s been a very emotional ride,” she said of doing the research for the book on Wilhelm’s life. She knew him for the last 30 years of his life, but she now more appreciates his humanity — the way he openly engaged with people — and humility.
After his death, he had a closet full of awards from his career.
“He didn’t solicit recognition. It came to him,” she said.
Phillip Sitter covers education for the Ames Tribune, including Iowa State University and PreK-12 schools in Ames and elsewhere in Story County. Phillip can be reached via email at [email protected]. He is on Twitter @pslifeisabeauty.
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