Inventor Name
The Manhattan Project Videohistory Collection
Repository
Smithsonian Institution Archives
P.O. Box 37012
Capital Gallery Building, Suite 3000, MRC 507
Washington, D.C. 20013-7012
202-633-5870
http://siarchives.si.edu/
Physical Description
This collection consists of eighteen interview sessions, separated into five collection divisions, totalling approximately 47:00 hours of recordings, and 1188 pages of transcript. There are three generations of tape for each session: originals, dubbing ma
Summary
Stanley Goldberg, consulting historian for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH), recorded eighteen video sessions with fifty-five participants involved in the engineering, physics, and culmination of the Manhattan Project. Goldberg examined the research and technologies necessary to realize the uranium and plutonium bombs. He supplemented interviews with visual documentation of the industrial plants that refined and separated the isotopes, and of the machinery that delivered and dropped the bombs. Interviewees explained the other steps of designing, building, testing and detonating an atomic bomb. Discussions with participants also elicited a social history of the Project as recalled by various men and women responsible for different duties in different locales. Between January 1987 and June 1990 the sessions were recorded on-site or in-studio in Hanford, Washington; Boston, Massachusetts; Oak Ridge and Louisville, Tennessee; Alamogordo and Los Alamos, New Mexico; Washington, D.C.; and Suitland, Maryland. The sessions are divided into five collection divisions: Hanford, Oak Ridge, Cambridge, Los Alamos, and Alberta.
Finding Aid
http://siarchives.si.edu/research/videohistory_catalog9531.html
