391 The Manhattan Project

The History of the Twentieth Century

Mark Painter

History

4.8 • 719 Ratings

🗓️ 25 December 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the American atom bomb project kicked into high gear. Fearful that the Germans were already working on a bomb and had a head start, the US government built a huge program meant to approach the problem of building an atom bomb from several different angles all at once.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The deep things in science are not found because they are useful.
0:24.4	They are found because it was possible to find them.
0:29.7	J. Robert Oppenheimer.
0:32.5	Welcome to the history of the 20th century.
1:13.1	Music to the history of the 20th century. Episode 391, the Manhattan Project.
1:22.1	Vinevar Bush was born on March 11, 1890, in Everett, Massachusetts.
1:27.3	His father, Richard Perry Bush, was a universalist minister. His mother, Emma Linwood-Pain, came from a
1:31.1	prominent Massachusetts family. VanEvar earned bachelor's and masters of science degrees from Tufts
1:38.7	University in 1913, and was awarded a PhD in engineering, jointly by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1916.
1:50.8	During the First World War, he worked with the U.S. National Research Council on a project to detect submarines.
1:59.7	After the war, he joined the faculty of MIT in the electrical engineering department.
2:05.9	He invented a thermal switch, which is an electrical switch that automatically turns itself off
2:12.2	when the temperature rises above a given point, then turns itself back on again after the temperature goes lower.
2:19.3	Such a device is useful as a safety measure to cut power to equipment that is overheating.
2:24.8	It is also the basis of the thermostat, a household device that turns the heater on and off as
2:30.6	needed to keep your home at a comfortable temperature automatically. Demand for these devices
2:35.7	was high, and they made Bush a wealthy man. He also invented an analog device that could solve
2:43.3	differential equations, and hey, my hat's off to him for that. I can't even solve differential
2:48.7	equations anymore.
3:00.1	In 1924, Bush teamed with a group of inventors to market another new invention, a voltage regulator tube.
3:08.9	This is a device that maintains a voltage at a constant level and was key to the manufacture of home radio receivers that could operate off the alternating current of household electricity. This invention arrived just as the radio craze was
3:15.6	taking off, and it made a lot of money for the company Bush and his investors created to manufacture
	...

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