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10,100 | Groves did not relish the prospect of explaining to a Senate committee the loss of a billion dollars worth of plutonium, so a cylindrical containment vessel codenamed "Jumbo" was constructed to recover the active material in the event of a failure. Measuring long and wide, it was fabricated at great expense from of iron and steel by Babcock & Wilcox in Barberton, Ohio. Brought in a special railroad car to a siding in Pope, New Mexico, it was transported the last to the test site on a trailer pulled by two tractors. By the time it arrived, however, confidence in the implosion method was high enough, and the availability of plutonium was sufficient, that Oppenheimer decided not to use it. Instead, it was placed atop a steel tower from the weapon as a rough measure of how powerful the explosion would be. In the end, Jumbo survived, although its tower did not, adding credence to the belief that Jumbo would have successfully contained a fizzled explosion. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,101 | A pre-test explosion was conducted on 7 May 1945 to calibrate the instruments. A wooden test platform was erected from Ground Zero and piled with of TNT spiked with nuclear fission products in the form of an irradiated uranium slug from Hanford, which was dissolved and poured into tubing inside the explosive. This explosion was observed by Oppenheimer and Groves's new deputy commander, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell. The pre-test produced data that proved vital for the Trinity test. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,102 | For the actual test, the weapon, nicknamed "the gadget", was hoisted to the top of a steel tower, as detonation at that height would give a better indication of how the weapon would behave when dropped from a bomber. Detonation in the air maximized the energy applied directly to the target, and generated less nuclear fallout. The gadget was assembled under the supervision of Norris Bradbury at the nearby McDonald Ranch House on 13 July, and precariously winched up the tower the following day. Observers included Bush, Chadwick, Conant, Farrell, Fermi, Groves, Lawrence, Oppenheimer and Tolman. At 05:30 on 16 July 1945 the gadget exploded with an energy equivalent of around 20 kilotons of TNT, leaving a crater of Trinitite (radioactive glass) in the desert wide. The shock wave was felt over away, and the mushroom cloud reached in height. It was heard as far away as El Paso, Texas, so Groves issued a cover story about an ammunition magazine explosion at Alamogordo Field. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,103 | Oppenheimer later recalled that, while witnessing the explosion, he thought of a verse from the Hindu holy book, the "Bhagavad Gita" (XI,12): | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,104 | In June 1944, the Manhattan Project employed some 129,000 workers, of whom 84,500 were construction workers, 40,500 were plant operators and 1,800 were military personnel. As construction activity fell off, the workforce declined to 100,000 a year later, but the number of military personnel increased to 5,600. Procuring the required numbers of workers, especially highly skilled workers, in competition with other vital wartime programs proved very difficult. In 1943, Groves obtained a special temporary priority for labor from the War Manpower Commission. In March 1944, both the War Production Board and the War Manpower Commission gave the project their highest priority. The Kansas commission director stated that from April to July 1944 every qualified applicant in the state who visited a United States Employment Service office was urged to work at the Hanford Site. No other job was offered until the applicant definitively rejected the offer. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,105 | Tolman and Conant, in their role as the project's scientific advisers, drew up a list of candidate scientists and had them rated by scientists already working on the project. Groves then sent a personal letter to the head of their university or company asking for them to be released for essential war work. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Stanislaw Ulam gave one of his students, Joan Hinton, an exam early, so she could leave to do war work. A few weeks later, Ulam received a letter from Hans Bethe, inviting him to join the project. Conant personally persuaded Kistiakowsky to join the project. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,106 | One source of skilled personnel was the Army itself, particularly the Army Specialized Training Program. In 1943, the MED created the Special Engineer Detachment (SED), with an authorized strength of 675. Technicians and skilled workers drafted into the Army were assigned to the SED. Another source was the Women's Army Corps (WAC). Initially intended for clerical tasks handling classified material, the WACs were soon tapped for technical and scientific tasks as well. On 1 February 1945, all military personnel assigned to the MED, including all SED detachments, were assigned to the 9812th Technical Service Unit, except at Los Alamos, where military personnel other than SED, including the WACs and Military Police, were assigned to the 4817th Service Command Unit. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,107 | An Associate Professor of Radiology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, Stafford L. Warren, was commissioned as a colonel in the United States Army Medical Corps, and appointed as chief of the MED's Medical Section and Groves' medical advisor. Warren's initial task was to staff hospitals at Oak Ridge, Richland and Los Alamos. The Medical Section was responsible for medical research, but also for the MED's health and safety programs. This presented an enormous challenge, because workers were handling a variety of toxic chemicals, using hazardous liquids and gases under high pressures, working with high voltages, and performing experiments involving explosives, not to mention the largely unknown dangers presented by radioactivity and handling fissile materials. Yet in December 1945, the National Safety Council presented the Manhattan Project with the Award of Honor for Distinguished Service to Safety in recognition of its safety record. Between January 1943 and June 1945, there were 62 fatalities and 3,879 disabling injuries, which was about 62 percent below the rate of private industry. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,108 | A 1945 "Life" article estimated that before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved." The magazine wrote that the more than 100,000 others employed with the project "worked like moles in the dark". Warned that disclosing the project's secrets was punishable by 10 years in prison or a fine of , they saw enormous quantities of raw materials enter factories with nothing coming out and monitored "dials and switches while behind thick concrete walls mysterious reactions took place" without knowing the purpose of their jobs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,109 | In December 1945 the United States Army published a secret report analysing and assessing the security apparatus surrounding the Manhattan Project. The report states that the Manhattan Project was "more drastically guarded than any other highly secret war development." The security infrastructure surrounding the Manhattan Project was so vast and thorough that in the early days of the project in 1943, security investigators vetted 400,000 potential employees and 600 companies that would be involved in all aspects of the project for potential security risks. Although at times the most important employer in the nation for government bureaucrats assigning manpower, they only knew of the "Pasco secret project"; one said that until Hiroshima "we had no idea what was being made". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,110 | Oak Ridge security personnel considered any private party with more than seven people as suspicious, and residents—who believed that US government agents were secretly among them—avoided repeatedly inviting the same guests. Although original residents of the area could be buried in existing cemeteries, every coffin was reportedly opened for inspection. Everyone, including top military officials, and their automobiles were searched when entering and exiting project facilities. One Oak Ridge worker stated that "if you got inquisitive, you were called on the carpet within two hours by government secret agents. Usually those summoned to explain were then escorted bag and baggage to the gate and ordered to keep going". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,111 | Despite being told that their work would help end the war and perhaps all future wars, not seeing or understanding the results of their often tedious duties—or even typical side effects of factory work such as smoke from smokestacks—and the war in Europe ending without the use of their work, caused serious morale problems among workers and caused many rumors to spread. One manager stated after the war: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,112 | Another worker told of how, working in a laundry, she every day held "a special instrument" to uniforms and listened for "a clicking noise". She learned only after the war that she had been performing the important task of checking for radiation with a geiger counter. To improve morale among such workers Oak Ridge created an extensive system of intramural sports leagues, including 10 baseball teams, 81 softball teams, and 26 football teams. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,113 | Voluntary censorship of atomic information began before the Manhattan Project. After the start of the European war in 1939 American scientists began avoiding publishing military-related research, and in 1940 scientific journals began asking the National Academy of Sciences to clear articles. William L. Laurence of "The New York Times", who wrote an article on atomic fission in "The Saturday Evening Post" of 7 September 1940, later learned that government officials asked librarians nationwide in 1943 to withdraw the issue. The Soviets noticed the silence, however. In April 1942 nuclear physicist Georgy Flyorov wrote to Josef Stalin on the absence of articles on nuclear fission in American journals; this resulted in the Soviet Union establishing its own atomic bomb project. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,114 | The Manhattan Project operated under tight security lest its discovery induce Axis powers, especially Germany, to accelerate their own nuclear projects or undertake covert operations against the project. The government's Office of Censorship, by contrast, relied on the press to comply with a voluntary code of conduct it published, and the project at first avoided notifying the office. By early 1943 newspapers began publishing reports of large construction in Tennessee and Washington based on public records, and the office began discussing with the project how to maintain secrecy. In June the Office of Censorship asked newspapers and broadcasters to avoid discussing "atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission, atomic splitting, or any of their equivalents. The use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials, heavy water, high voltage discharge equipment, cyclotrons." The office also asked to avoid discussion of "polonium, uranium, ytterbium, hafnium, protactinium, radium, rhenium, thorium, deuterium"; only uranium was sensitive, but was listed with other elements to hide its importance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,115 | The prospect of sabotage was always present, and sometimes suspected when there were equipment failures. While there were some problems believed to be the result of careless or disgruntled employees, there were no confirmed instances of Axis-instigated sabotage. However, on 10 March 1945, a Japanese fire balloon struck a power line, and the resulting power surge caused the three reactors at Hanford to be temporarily shut down. With so many people involved, security was a difficult task. A special Counter Intelligence Corps detachment was formed to handle the project's security issues. By 1943, it was clear that the Soviet Union was attempting to penetrate the project. Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash, the head of the Counter Intelligence Branch of the Western Defense Command, investigated suspected Soviet espionage at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. Oppenheimer informed Pash that he had been approached by a fellow professor at Berkeley, Haakon Chevalier, about passing information to the Soviet Union. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,116 | The most successful Soviet spy was Klaus Fuchs, a member of the British Mission who played an important part at Los Alamos. The 1950 revelation of his espionage activities damaged the United States' nuclear cooperation with Britain and Canada. Subsequently, other instances of espionage were uncovered, leading to the arrest of Harry Gold, David Greenglass, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Other spies like George Koval and Theodore Hall remained unknown for decades. The value of the espionage is difficult to quantify, as the principal constraint on the Soviet atomic bomb project was a shortage of uranium ore. The consensus is that espionage saved the Soviets one or two years of effort. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,117 | In addition to developing the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project was charged with gathering intelligence on the German nuclear energy project. It was believed that the Japanese nuclear weapons program was not far advanced because Japan had little access to uranium ore, but it was initially feared that Germany was very close to developing its own weapons. At the instigation of the Manhattan Project, a bombing and sabotage campaign was carried out against heavy water plants in German-occupied Norway. A small mission was created, jointly staffed by the Office of Naval Intelligence, OSRD, the Manhattan Project, and Army Intelligence (G-2), to investigate enemy scientific developments. It was not restricted to those involving nuclear weapons. The Chief of Army Intelligence, Major General George V. Strong, appointed Boris Pash to command the unit, which was codenamed "Alsos", a Greek word meaning "grove". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,118 | The Alsos Mission to Italy questioned staff of the physics laboratory at the University of Rome following the capture of the city in June 1944. Meanwhile, Pash formed a combined British and American Alsos mission in London under the command of Captain Horace K. Calvert to participate in Operation Overlord. Groves considered the risk that the Germans might attempt to disrupt the Normandy landings with radioactive poisons was sufficient to warn General Dwight D. Eisenhower and send an officer to brief his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith. Under the codename Operation Peppermint, special equipment was prepared and Chemical Warfare Service teams were trained in its use. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,119 | Following in the wake of the advancing Allied armies, Pash and Calvert interviewed Frédéric Joliot-Curie about the activities of German scientists. They spoke to officials at Union Minière du Haut Katanga about uranium shipments to Germany. They tracked down 68 tons of ore in Belgium and 30 tons in France. The interrogation of German prisoners indicated that uranium and thorium were being processed in Oranienburg, 20 miles north of Berlin, so Groves arranged for it to be bombed on 15 March 1945. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,120 | An Alsos team went to Stassfurt in the Soviet Occupation Zone and retrieved 11 tons of ore from WIFO. In April 1945, Pash, in command of a composite force known as T-Force, conducted Operation Harborage, a sweep behind enemy lines of the cities of Hechingen, Bisingen, and Haigerloch that were the heart of the German nuclear effort. T-Force captured the nuclear laboratories, documents, equipment and supplies, including heavy water and 1.5 tons of metallic uranium. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,121 | Alsos teams rounded up German scientists including Kurt Diebner, Otto Hahn, Walther Gerlach, Werner Heisenberg, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, who were taken to England where they were interned at Farm Hall, a bugged house in Godmanchester. After the bombs were detonated in Japan, the Germans were forced to confront the fact that the Allies had done what they could not. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,122 | Starting in November 1943, the Army Air Forces Materiel Command at Wright Field, Ohio, began Silverplate, the codename modification of B-29s to carry the bombs. Test drops were carried out at Muroc Army Air Field, California, and the Naval Ordnance Test Station at Inyokern, California. Groves met with the Chief of United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), General Henry H. Arnold, in March 1944 to discuss the delivery of the finished bombs to their targets. The only Allied aircraft capable of carrying the long Thin Man or the wide Fat Man was the British Avro Lancaster, but using a British aircraft would have caused difficulties with maintenance. Groves hoped that the American Boeing B-29 Superfortress could be modified to carry Thin Man by joining its two bomb bays together. Arnold promised that no effort would be spared to modify B-29s to do the job, and designated Major General Oliver P. Echols as the USAAF liaison to the Manhattan Project. In turn, Echols named Colonel Roscoe C. Wilson as his alternate, and Wilson became Manhattan Project's main USAAF contact. President Roosevelt instructed Groves that if the atomic bombs were ready before the war with Germany ended, he should be ready to drop them on Germany. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,123 | The 509th Composite Group was activated on 17 December 1944 at Wendover Army Air Field, Utah, under the command of Colonel Paul W. Tibbets. This base, close to the border with Nevada, was codenamed "Kingman" or "W-47". Training was conducted at Wendover and at Batista Army Airfield, Cuba, where the 393d Bombardment Squadron practiced long-distance flights over water, and dropping dummy pumpkin bombs. A special unit known as Project Alberta was formed at Los Alamos under Navy Captain William S. Parsons from Project Y as part of the Manhattan Project to assist in preparing and delivering the bombs. Commander Frederick L. Ashworth from Alberta met with Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz on Guam in February 1945 to inform him of the project. While he was there, Ashworth selected North Field on the Pacific Island Tinian as a base for the 509th Composite Group, and reserved space for the group and its buildings. The group deployed there in July 1945. Farrell arrived at Tinian on 30 July as the Manhattan Project representative. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,124 | Most of the components for Little Boy left San Francisco on the cruiser on 16 July and arrived on Tinian on 26 July. Four days later the ship was sunk by a Japanese submarine. The remaining components, which included six uranium-235 rings, were delivered by three C-54 Skymasters of the 509th Group's 320th Troop Carrier Squadron. Two Fat Man assemblies travelled to Tinian in specially modified 509th Composite Group B-29s. The first plutonium core went in a special C-54. In late April, a joint targeting committee of the Manhattan District and USAAF was established to determine which cities in Japan should be targets, and recommended Kokura, Hiroshima, Niigata, and Kyoto. At this point, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson intervened, announcing that he would be making the targeting decision, and that he would not authorize the bombing of Kyoto on the grounds of its historical and religious significance. Groves therefore asked Arnold to remove Kyoto not just from the list of nuclear targets, but from targets for conventional bombing as well. One of Kyoto's substitutes was Nagasaki. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,125 | In May 1945, the Interim Committee was created to advise on wartime and postwar use of nuclear energy. The committee was chaired by Stimson, with James F. Byrnes, a former US Senator soon to be Secretary of State, as President Harry S. Truman's personal representative; Ralph A. Bard, the Under Secretary of the Navy; William L. Clayton, the Assistant Secretary of State; Vannevar Bush; Karl T. Compton; James B. Conant; and George L. Harrison, an assistant to Stimson and president of New York Life Insurance Company. The Interim Committee in turn established a scientific panel consisting of Arthur Compton, Fermi, Lawrence and Oppenheimer to advise it on scientific issues. In its presentation to the Interim Committee, the scientific panel offered its opinion not just on the likely physical effects of an atomic bomb, but on its probable military and political impact. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,126 | At the Potsdam Conference in Germany, Truman was informed that the Trinity test had been successful. He told Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, that the US had a new superweapon, without giving any details. This was the first official communication to the Soviet Union about the bomb, but Stalin already knew about it from spies. With the authorization to use the bomb against Japan already given, no alternatives were considered after the Japanese rejection of the Potsdam Declaration. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,127 | On 6 August 1945, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress ("Enola Gay") of the 393d Bombardment Squadron, piloted by Tibbets, lifted off from North Field with a Little Boy in its bomb bay. Hiroshima, the headquarters of the 2nd General Army and Fifth Division and a port of embarkation, was the primary target of the mission, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternatives. With Farrell's permission, Parsons, the weaponeer in charge of the mission, completed the bomb assembly in the air to minimize the risks of a nuclear explosion in the event of a crash during takeoff. The bomb detonated at an altitude of with a blast that was later estimated to be the equivalent of 13 kilotons of TNT. An area of approximately was destroyed. Japanese officials determined that 69% of Hiroshima's buildings were destroyed and another 6–7% damaged. About 70,000 to 80,000 people, of whom 20,000 were Japanese combatants and 20,000 were Korean slave laborers, or some 30% of the population of Hiroshima, were killed immediately, and another 70,000 injured. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,128 | On the morning of 9 August 1945, a second B-29 ("Bockscar"), piloted by the 393d Bombardment Squadron's commander, Major Charles W. Sweeney, lifted off with a Fat Man on board. This time, Ashworth served as weaponeer and Kokura was the primary target. Sweeney took off with the weapon already armed but with the electrical safety plugs still engaged. When they reached Kokura, they found cloud cover had obscured the city, prohibiting the visual attack required by orders. After three runs over the city, and with fuel running low, they headed for the secondary target, Nagasaki. Ashworth decided that a radar approach would be used if the target was obscured, but a last-minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed a visual approach as ordered. The Fat Man was dropped over the city's industrial valley midway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works in the north. The resulting explosion had a blast yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT, roughly the same as the Trinity blast, but was confined to the Urakami Valley, and a major portion of the city was protected by the intervening hills, resulting in the destruction of about 44% of the city. The bombing also crippled the city's industrial production extensively and killed 23,200–28,200 Japanese industrial workers and 150 Japanese soldiers. Overall, an estimated 35,000–40,000 people were killed and 60,000 injured. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,129 | Groves expected to have another atomic bomb ready for use on 19 August, with three more in September and a further three in October. Two more Fat Man assemblies were readied, and scheduled to leave Kirtland Field for Tinian on 11 and 14 August. At Los Alamos, technicians worked 24 hours straight to cast another plutonium core. Although cast, it still needed to be pressed and coated, which would take until 16 August. It could therefore have been ready for use on 19 August. On 10 August, Truman secretly requested that additional atomic bombs not be dropped on Japan without his express authority. Groves suspended the third core's shipment on his own authority on 13 August. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,130 | On 11 August, Groves phoned Warren with orders to organize a survey team to report on the damage and radioactivity at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A party equipped with portable Geiger counters arrived in Hiroshima on 8 September headed by Farrell and Warren, with Japanese Rear Admiral Masao Tsuzuki, who acted as a translator. They remained in Hiroshima until 14 September and then surveyed Nagasaki from 19 September to 8 October. This and other scientific missions to Japan provided valuable scientific and historical data. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,131 | The necessity of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became a subject of controversy among historians. Some questioned whether an "atomic diplomacy" would not have attained the same goals and disputed whether the bombings or the Soviet declaration of war on Japan was decisive. The Franck Report was the most notable effort pushing for a demonstration but was turned down by the Interim Committee's scientific panel. The Szilárd petition, drafted in July 1945 and signed by dozens of scientists working on the Manhattan Project, was a late attempt at warning President Harry S. Truman about his responsibility in using such weapons. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,132 | Seeing the work they had not understood produce the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs amazed the workers of the Manhattan Project as much as the rest of the world; newspapers in Oak Ridge announcing the Hiroshima bomb sold for $1 ($ today). Although the bombs' existence was public, secrecy continued, and many workers remained ignorant of their jobs; one stated in 1946, "I don't know what the hell I'm doing besides looking into a ——— and turning a ——— alongside a ———. I don't know anything about it, and there's nothing to say". Many residents continued to avoid discussion of "the stuff" in ordinary conversation despite it being the reason for their town's existence. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,133 | In anticipation of the bombings, Groves had Henry DeWolf Smyth prepare a history for public consumption. "Atomic Energy for Military Purposes", better known as the "Smyth Report", was released to the public on 12 August 1945. Groves and Nichols presented Army–Navy "E" Awards to key contractors, whose involvement had hitherto been secret. Over 20 awards of the Presidential Medal for Merit were made to key contractors and scientists, including Bush and Oppenheimer. Military personnel received the Legion of Merit, including the commander of the Women's Army Corps detachment, Captain Arlene G. Scheidenhelm. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,134 | At Hanford, plutonium production fell off as Reactors B, D and F wore out, poisoned by fission products and swelling of the graphite moderator known as the Wigner effect. The swelling damaged the charging tubes where the uranium was irradiated to produce plutonium, rendering them unusable. In order to maintain the supply of polonium for the urchin initiators, production was curtailed and the oldest unit, B pile, was closed down so at least one reactor would be available in the future. Research continued, with DuPont and the Metallurgical Laboratory developing a redox solvent extraction process as an alternative plutonium extraction technique to the bismuth phosphate process, which left unspent uranium in a state from which it could not easily be recovered. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,135 | Bomb engineering was carried out by the Z Division, named for its director, Dr. Jerrold R. Zacharias from Los Alamos. Z Division was initially located at Wendover Field but moved to Oxnard Field, New Mexico, in September 1945 to be closer to Los Alamos. This marked the beginning of Sandia Base. Nearby Kirtland Field was used as a B-29 base for aircraft compatibility and drop tests. By October, all the staff and facilities at Wendover had been transferred to Sandia. As reservist officers were demobilized, they were replaced by about fifty hand-picked regular officers. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,136 | Nichols recommended that S-50 and the Alpha tracks at Y-12 be closed down. This was done in September. Although performing better than ever, the Alpha tracks could not compete with K-25 and the new K-27, which had commenced operation in January 1946. In December, the Y-12 plant was closed, thereby cutting the Tennessee Eastman payroll from 8,600 to 1,500 and saving $2 million a month. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,137 | Nowhere was demobilization more of a problem than at Los Alamos, where there was an exodus of talent. Much remained to be done. The bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were like laboratory pieces; work would be required to make them simpler, safer and more reliable. Implosion methods needed to be developed for uranium in place of the wasteful gun method, and composite uranium-plutonium cores were needed now that plutonium was in short supply because of the problems with the reactors. However, uncertainty about the future of the laboratory made it hard to induce people to stay. Oppenheimer returned to his job at the University of California and Groves appointed Norris Bradbury as an interim replacement; Bradbury remained in the post for the next 25 years. Groves attempted to combat the dissatisfaction caused by the lack of amenities with a construction program that included an improved water supply, three hundred houses, and recreation facilities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,138 | Two Fat Man-type detonations were conducted at Bikini Atoll in July 1946 as part of Operation Crossroads to investigate the effect of nuclear weapons on warships. Able was detonated on 1 July 1946. The more spectacular Baker was detonated underwater on 25 July 1946. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,139 | After the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a number of Manhattan Project physicists founded the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists", which began as an emergency action undertaken by scientists who saw urgent need for an immediate educational program about atomic weapons. In the face of the destructiveness of the new weapons and in anticipation of the nuclear arms race several project members including Bohr, Bush and Conant expressed the view that it was necessary to reach agreement on international control of nuclear research and atomic weapons. The Baruch Plan, unveiled in a speech to the newly formed United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) in June 1946, proposed the establishment of an international atomic development authority, but was not adopted. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,140 | Following a domestic debate over the permanent management of the nuclear program, the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was created by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 to take over the functions and assets of the Manhattan Project. It established civilian control over atomic development, and separated the development, production and control of atomic weapons from the military. Military aspects were taken over by the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP). Although the Manhattan Project ceased to exist on 31 December 1946, the Manhattan District was not abolished until 15 August 1947. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,141 | The project expenditure through 1 October 1945 was $1.845 billion, equivalent to less than nine days of wartime spending, and was $2.191 billion when the AEC assumed control on 1 January 1947. Total allocation was $2.4 billion. Over 90% of the cost was for building plants and producing the fissionable materials, and less than 10% for development and production of the weapons. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,142 | A total of four weapons (the Trinity gadget, Little Boy, Fat Man, and an unused Fat Man bomb) were produced by the end of 1945, making the average cost per bomb around $500 million in 1945 dollars. By comparison, the project's total cost by the end of 1945 was about 90% of the total spent on the production of US small arms (not including ammunition) and 34% of the total spent on US tanks during the same period. Overall, it was the second most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, behind only the design and production of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,143 | The political and cultural impacts of the development of nuclear weapons were profound and far-reaching. William Laurence of "The New York Times", the first to use the phrase "Atomic Age", became the official correspondent for the Manhattan Project in spring 1945. In 1943 and 1944 he unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the Office of Censorship to permit writing about the explosive potential of uranium, and government officials felt that he had earned the right to report on the biggest secret of the war. Laurence witnessed both the Trinity test and the bombing of Nagasaki and wrote the official press releases prepared for them. He went on to write a series of articles extolling the virtues of the new weapon. His reporting before and after the bombings helped to spur public awareness of the potential of nuclear technology and motivated its development in the United States and the Soviet Union. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,144 | The wartime Manhattan Project left a legacy in the form of the network of national laboratories: the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Ames Laboratory. Two more were established by Groves soon after the war, the Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, New York, and the Sandia National Laboratories at Albuquerque, New Mexico. Groves allocated $72 million to them for research activities in fiscal year 1946–1947. They would be in the vanguard of the kind of large-scale research that Alvin Weinberg, the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, would call Big Science. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,145 | The Naval Research Laboratory had long been interested in the prospect of using nuclear power for warship propulsion, and sought to create its own nuclear project. In May 1946, Nimitz, now Chief of Naval Operations, decided that the Navy should instead work with the Manhattan Project. A group of naval officers were assigned to Oak Ridge, the most senior of whom was Captain Hyman G. Rickover, who became assistant director there. They immersed themselves in the study of nuclear energy, laying the foundations for a nuclear-powered navy. A similar group of Air Force personnel arrived at Oak Ridge in September 1946 with the aim of developing nuclear aircraft. Their Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) project ran into formidable technical difficulties, and was ultimately cancelled. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,146 | The ability of the new reactors to create radioactive isotopes in previously unheard-of quantities sparked a revolution in nuclear medicine in the immediate postwar years. Starting in mid-1946, Oak Ridge began distributing radioisotopes to hospitals and universities. Most of the orders were for iodine-131 and phosphorus-32, which were used in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. In addition to medicine, isotopes were also used in biological, industrial and agricultural research. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,147 | On handing over control to the Atomic Energy Commission, Groves bid farewell to the people who had worked on the Manhattan Project: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,148 | In 2014, the United States Congress passed a law providing for a national park dedicated to the history of the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project National Historical Park was established on 10 November 2015. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19603 |
10,149 | The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the most prestigious and highly ranked academic institutions in the world. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,150 | Founded in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. MIT is one of three private land grant universities in the United States, the others being Cornell University and Tuskegee University. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River, and encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Bates Center, and the Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad and Whitehead Institutes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,151 | , 98 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 83 Marshall Scholars, 41 astronauts, 16 Chief Scientists of the US Air Force, and numerous heads of states have been affiliated with MIT. The institute also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. MIT is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and has received more Sloan Research Fellowships and Hertz Fellowships than any other university. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,152 | In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a "Conservatory of Art and Science", but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,153 | Rogers, a graduate of William and Mary and professor at UVA, wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,154 | The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,155 | The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.<ref name="Angulo https://archive.org/details/williambartonrog00angu/page/155 155–156"></ref> | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,156 | Two days after MIT was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT's first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes" and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,157 | MIT was informally called "Boston Tech". The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,158 | The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these "Boston Tech" years, MIT faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot's repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,159 | In 1916, the MIT administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge "Bucentaur" built for the occasion, to signify MIT's move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical "New Technology" campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious "Mr. Smith", starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($ million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,160 | In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms "renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering". Unlike Ivy League schools, MIT catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,161 | Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at MIT that "the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school", a "partly unjustified" perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,162 | MIT's involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at MIT's Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper's Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, MIT became the nation's largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($ billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,163 | These activities affected MIT profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of "any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute" to match the return to peacetime, remembering the "academic tranquility of the prewar years", though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of MIT between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, MIT no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,164 | In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and MIT's defense research. In this period MIT's various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. MIT ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to "greater strength and unity" after these times of turmoil. However six MIT students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT's role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock's film, "November Actions", records some of these tumultuous events.) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,165 | In the 1980s, there was more controversy at MIT over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, MIT's research for the military has included work on robots, drones and 'battle suits'. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,166 | MIT has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like "Spacewar!" and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman's GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 MIT classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,167 | MIT was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new "backlot" buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School's eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,168 | In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, MIT launched OpenCourseWare to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, MIT announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its "MITx" program, for a modest fee. The "edX" online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous "Harvardx" initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the MIT faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,169 | MIT has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier's memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the MIT community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, MIT announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to "an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of the MIT community and in all aspects of his life". The announcement further stated that "Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,170 | In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,171 | The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology, MIT, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation. It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and MIT physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also an MIT graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,172 | MIT's campus in the city of Cambridge spans approximately a mile along the north side of the Charles River basin. The campus is divided roughly in half by Massachusetts Avenue, with most dormitories and student life facilities to the west and most academic buildings to the east. The bridge closest to MIT is the Harvard Bridge, which is known for being marked off in a non-standard unit of length – the smoot. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,173 | The Kendall/MIT MBTA Red Line station is located on the northeastern edge of the campus, in Kendall Square. The Cambridge neighborhoods surrounding MIT are a mixture of high tech companies occupying both modern office and rehabilitated industrial buildings, as well as socio-economically diverse residential neighborhoods. In early 2016, MIT presented its updated Kendall Square Initiative to the City of Cambridge, with plans for mixed-use educational, retail, residential, startup incubator, and office space in a dense high-rise transit-oriented development plan. The MIT Museum will eventually be moved immediately adjacent to a Kendall Square subway entrance, joining the List Visual Arts Center on the eastern end of the campus. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,174 | Each building at MIT has a number (possibly preceded by a "W", "N", "E", or "NW") designation, and most have a name as well. Typically, academic and office buildings are referred to primarily by number while residence halls are referred to by name. The organization of building numbers roughly corresponds to the order in which the buildings were built and their location relative (north, west, and east) to the original center cluster of Maclaurin buildings. Many of the buildings are connected above ground as well as through an extensive network of tunnels, providing protection from the Cambridge weather as well as a venue for roof and tunnel hacking. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,175 | MIT's on-campus nuclear reactor is one of the most powerful university-based nuclear reactors in the United States. The prominence of the reactor's containment building in a densely populated area has been controversial, but MIT maintains that it is well-secured. In 1999 Bill Gates donated US$20 million to MIT for the construction of a computer laboratory named the "William H. Gates Building", and designed by architect Frank Gehry. While Microsoft had previously given financial support to the institution, this was the first personal donation received from Gates. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,176 | MIT Nano, also known as Building 12, is an interdisciplinary facility for nanoscale research. Its cleanroom and research space, visible through expansive glass facades, is the largest research facility of its kind in the nation. With a cost of US$400 million, it is also one of the costliest buildings on campus. The facility also provides state-of-the-art nanoimaging capabilities with vibration damped imaging and metrology suites sitting atop a slab of concrete underground. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,177 | Other notable campus facilities include a pressurized wind tunnel for testing aerodynamic research, a towing tank for testing ship and ocean structure designs, and previously Alcator C-Mod, which was the largest fusion device operated by any university. MIT's campus-wide wireless network was completed in the fall of 2005 and consists of nearly 3,000 access points covering of campus. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,178 | In 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency sued MIT for violating the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act with regard to its hazardous waste storage and disposal procedures. MIT settled the suit by paying a $155,000 fine and launching three environmental projects. In connection with capital campaigns to expand the campus, the Institute has also extensively renovated existing buildings to improve their energy efficiency. MIT has also taken steps to reduce its environmental impact by running alternative fuel campus shuttles, subsidizing public transportation passes, and building a low-emission cogeneration plant that serves most of the campus electricity, heating, and cooling requirements. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,179 | MIT has substantial commercial real estate holdings in Cambridge on which it pays property taxes, plus an additional voluntary payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) on academic buildings which are legally tax-exempt. , it is the largest taxpayer in the city, contributing approximately 14% of the city's annual revenues. Holdings include Technology Square, parts of Kendall Square, and many properties in Cambridgeport and Area 4 neighboring the educational buildings. The land is held for investment purposes and potential long-term expansion. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,180 | MIT's School of Architecture, now the School of Architecture and Planning, was the first formal architecture program in the United States, and it has a history of commissioning progressive buildings. The first buildings constructed on the Cambridge campus, completed in 1916, are sometimes called the "Maclaurin buildings" after Institute president Richard Maclaurin who oversaw their construction. Designed by William Welles Bosworth, these imposing buildings were built of reinforced concrete, a first for a non-industrial – much less university – building in the US. Bosworth's design was influenced by the City Beautiful Movement of the early 1900s and features the Pantheon-esque Great Dome housing the Barker Engineering Library. The Great Dome overlooks Killian Court, where graduation ceremonies are held each year. The friezes of the limestone-clad buildings around Killian Court are engraved with the names of important scientists and philosophers. The spacious Building 7 atrium at 77 Massachusetts Avenue is regarded as the entrance to the Infinite Corridor and the rest of the campus. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,181 | Alvar Aalto's Baker House (1947), Eero Saarinen's MIT Chapel and Kresge Auditorium (1955), and I.M. Pei's Green, Dreyfus, Landau, and Wiesner buildings represent high forms of post-war modernist architecture. More recent buildings like Frank Gehry's Stata Center (2004), Steven Holl's Simmons Hall (2002), Charles Correa's Building 46 (2005), and Fumihiko Maki's Media Lab Extension (2009) stand out among the Boston area's classical architecture and serve as examples of contemporary campus "starchitecture". These buildings have not always been well received; in 2010, "The Princeton Review" included MIT in a list of twenty schools whose campuses are "tiny, unsightly, or both". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,182 | Undergraduates are guaranteed four-year housing in one of MIT's 11 undergraduate dormitories. Those living on campus can receive support and mentoring from live-in graduate student tutors, resident advisors, and faculty housemasters. Because housing assignments are made based on the preferences of the students themselves, diverse social atmospheres can be sustained in different living groups; for example, according to the "Yale Daily News" staff's "The Insider's Guide to the Colleges, 2010", "The split between East Campus and West Campus is a significant characteristic of MIT. East Campus has gained a reputation as a thriving counterculture." MIT also has 5 dormitories for single graduate students and 2 apartment buildings on campus for married student families. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,183 | MIT has an active Greek and co-op housing system, including thirty-six fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups (FSILGs). , 98% of all undergraduates lived in MIT-affiliated housing; 54% of the men participated in fraternities and 20% of the women were involved in sororities. Most FSILGs are located across the river in Back Bay near where MIT was founded, and there is also a cluster of fraternities on MIT's West Campus that face the Charles River Basin. After the 1997 alcohol-related death of Scott Krueger, a new pledge at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, MIT required all freshmen to live in the dormitory system starting in 2002. Because FSILGs had previously housed as many as 300 freshmen off-campus, the new policy could not be implemented until Simmons Hall opened in that year. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,184 | In 2013–2014, MIT abruptly closed and then demolished undergrad dorm Bexley Hall, citing extensive water damage that made repairs infeasible. In 2017, MIT shut down Senior House after a century of service as an undergrad dorm. That year, MIT administrators released data showing just 60% of Senior House residents had graduated in four years. Campus-wide, the four-year graduation rate is 84% (the cumulative graduation rate is significantly higher). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,185 | MIT is chartered as a non-profit organization and is owned and governed by a privately appointed board of trustees known as the MIT Corporation. The current board consists of 43 members elected to five-year terms, 25 life members who vote until their 75th birthday, 3 elected officers (President, Treasurer, and Secretary), and 4 "ex officio" members (the president of the alumni association, the Governor of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Secretary of Education, and the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court). The board is chaired by Diane Greene SM ’78, co-founder and former CEO of VMware and former CEO of Google Cloud. The Corporation approves the budget, new programs, degrees and faculty appointments, and elects the President to serve as the chief executive officer of the university and preside over the Institute's faculty. MIT's endowment and other financial assets are managed through a subsidiary called MIT Investment Management Company (MITIMCo). Valued at $16.4 billion in 2018, MIT's endowment was then the sixth-largest among American colleges and universities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,186 | MIT has five schools (Science, Engineering, Architecture and Planning, Management, and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) and one college (Schwarzman College of Computing), but no schools of law or medicine. While faculty committees assert substantial control over many areas of MIT's curriculum, research, student life, and administrative affairs, the chair of each of MIT's 32 academic departments reports to the dean of that department's school, who in turn reports to the Provost under the President. The current president is L. Rafael Reif, who formerly served as provost under President Susan Hockfield, the first woman to hold the post. Sally Kornbluth, a cell biologist and provost at Duke University will become MIT's 18th president in January 2023. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,187 | MIT is a large, highly residential, research university with a majority of enrollments in graduate and professional programs. The university has been accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges since 1929. MIT operates on a 4–1–4 academic calendar with the fall semester beginning after Labor Day and ending in mid-December, a 4-week "Independent Activities Period" in the month of January, and the spring semester commencing in early February and ceasing in late May. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,188 | MIT students refer to both their majors and classes using numbers or acronyms alone. Departments and their corresponding majors are numbered in the approximate order of their foundation; for example, Civil and Environmental Engineering is , while Linguistics and Philosophy is . Students majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the most popular department, collectively identify themselves as "Course 6". MIT students use a combination of the department's course number and the number assigned to the class to identify their subjects; for instance, the introductory calculus-based classical mechanics course is simply "8.01" at MIT. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,189 | The four-year, full-time undergraduate program maintains a balance between professional majors and those in the arts and sciences. In 2010, it was dubbed "most selective" by "U.S. News", admitting few transfer students and 4.1% of its applicants in the 2020–2021 admissions cycle. MIT offers 44 undergraduate degrees across its five schools. In the 2017–2018 academic year, 1,045 Bachelor of Science degrees (abbreviated "SB") were granted, the only type of undergraduate degree MIT now awards. In the 2011 fall term, among students who had designated a major, the School of Engineering was the most popular division, enrolling 63% of students in its 19 degree programs, followed by the School of Science (29%), School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences (3.7%), Sloan School of Management (3.3%), and School of Architecture and Planning (2%). The largest undergraduate degree programs were in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (), Computer Science and Engineering (), Mechanical Engineering (), Physics (), and Mathematics (). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,190 | All undergraduates are required to complete a core curriculum called the General Institute Requirements (GIRs). The Science Requirement, generally completed during freshman year as prerequisites for classes in science and engineering majors, comprises two semesters of physics, two semesters of calculus, one semester of chemistry, and one semester of biology. There is a Laboratory Requirement, usually satisfied by an appropriate class in a course major. The Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) Requirement consists of eight semesters of classes in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, including at least one semester from each division as well as the courses required for a designated concentration in a HASS division. Under the Communication Requirement, two of the HASS classes, plus two of the classes taken in the designated major must be "communication-intensive", including "substantial instruction and practice in oral presentation". Finally, all students are required to complete a swimming test; non-varsity athletes must also take four quarters of physical education classes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,191 | Most classes rely on a combination of lectures, recitations led by associate professors or graduate students, weekly problem sets ("p-sets"), and periodic quizzes or tests. While the pace and difficulty of MIT coursework has been compared to "drinking from a fire hose", the freshmen retention rate at MIT is similar to other research universities. The "pass/no-record" grading system relieves some pressure for first-year undergraduates. For each class taken in the fall term, freshmen transcripts will either report only that the class was passed, or otherwise not have any record of it. In the spring term, passing grades (A, B, C) appear on the transcript while non-passing grades are again not recorded. (Grading had previously been "pass/no record" all freshman year, but was amended for the Class of 2006 to prevent students from gaming the system by completing required major classes in their freshman year.) Also, freshmen may choose to join alternative learning communities, such as Experimental Study Group, Concourse, or Terrascope. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,192 | In 1969, Margaret MacVicar founded the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) to enable undergraduates to collaborate directly with faculty members and researchers. Students join or initiate research projects ("UROPs") for academic credit, pay, or on a volunteer basis through postings on the UROP website or by contacting faculty members directly. A substantial majority of undergraduates participate. Students often become published, file patent applications, and/or launch start-up companies based upon their experience in UROPs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,193 | In 1970, the then-Dean of Institute Relations, Benson R. Snyder, published "The Hidden Curriculum," arguing that education at MIT was often slighted in favor of following a set of unwritten expectations and that graduating with good grades was more often the product of figuring out the system rather than a solid education. The successful student, according to Snyder, was the one who was able to discern which of the formal requirements were to be ignored in favor of which unstated norms. For example, organized student groups had compiled "course bibles"—collections of problem-set and examination questions and answers for later students to use as references. This sort of gamesmanship, Snyder argued, hindered development of a creative intellect and contributed to student discontent and unrest. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,194 | MIT's graduate program has high coexistence with the undergraduate program, and many courses are taken by qualified students at both levels. MIT offers a comprehensive doctoral program with degrees in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields as well as professional degrees, including the Master of Business Administration (MBA). The Institute offers graduate programs leading to academic degrees such as the Master of Science (which is abbreviated as SM at MIT), various Engineer's Degrees, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), and Doctor of Science (ScD) and interdisciplinary graduate programs such as the MD-PhD (with Harvard Medical School) and a joint program in oceanography with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,195 | Admission to graduate programs is decentralized; applicants apply directly to the department or degree program. More than 90% of doctoral students are supported by fellowships, research assistantships (RAs), or teaching assistantships (TAs). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,196 | MIT Bootcamps are intense week-long innovation and leadership programs that challenge participants to develop a venture in a week. Each Bootcamp centers around a particular topic, specific to an industry, leadership skill set, or emerging technology. Cohorts are organized into small teams who work on an entrepreneurial project together, in addition to individual learning and team coaching. The program includes a series of online seminars with MIT faculty, practitioners, and industry experts, innovation workshops with bootcamp instructors focused on putting the theory participants have learned into practice, coaching sessions, and informal office hours for learners to exchange ideas freely. Bootcampers are tasked with weekly "deliverables," which are key elements of a business plan, to help guide the group through the decision-making process involved in building an enterprise. The experience culminates in a final pitch session, judged by a panel of experts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,197 | MIT Bootcamp instructors include Eric von Hippel, Sanjay Sarma, Erdin Beshimov, and Bill Aulet. MIT Bootcamps were founded by Erdin Beshimov. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,198 | MIT places among the top five in many overall rankings of universities (see table right) and rankings based on students' revealed preferences. For several years, "U.S. News & World Report", the QS World University Rankings, and the Academic Ranking of World Universities have ranked MIT's School of Engineering first, as did the 1995 National Research Council report. In the same lists, MIT's strongest showings apart from in engineering are in computer science, the natural sciences, business, architecture, economics, linguistics, mathematics, and, to a lesser extent, political science and philosophy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
10,199 | Times Higher Education has recognized MIT as one of the world's "six super brands" on its "World Reputation Rankings", along with Berkeley, Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford. In 2019, it was ranked #3 among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. In 2017, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings also rated MIT the #2 university for arts and humanities. MIT was ranked #7 in 2015 and #6 in 2017 of the Nature Index Annual Tables, which measure the largest contributors to papers published in 82 leading journals. Georgetown University researchers ranked MIT #3 in the US for 20-year return on investment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18879 |
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