Atomic Women

by Roseanne Montillo

  When Mayer arrived in Germany, he was set to work with Max Born and James Franck, and likely would have met Maria at some point, but their first encounter happened outside the university halls.

  By then, Maria had pretty much barricaded herself in the basement of the university with other students, experimenting and learning. Her life revolved around schoolwork and her town, and she was mostly unaware of what was happening beyond the confines of her city. She was deeply involved in her PhD dissertation, and her work took up the better part of her day.

  When her father died, her mother started taking in boarders. Their house was large, and she missed the comings and goings of people, the voices that had filled the rooms. The boarders were mostly Frau Goeppert’s business; Maria never had anything to do with them. However, the winter of 1929 weighed heavily on Frau Goeppert’s health, and she was often ill. As a result, Maria was required to help her with these transactions.

  The day Joseph Mayer showed up to ask about the possibility of renting a room, Frau Goeppert was sick again. It was Maria who opened the door. Shy and quiet, she found herself facing a very tall, friendly American who tried his best with the German language. She replied in perfect English.

  Joseph was immediately taken with the petite blonde whose blue eyes looked up at him with suspicion, but for her part, she always maintained that she never paid much attention to him until she saw him swimming at the local pool.

  As spring arrived, the two began spending a lot of time together, hiking the nearby lands and lounging in the countryside, dancing, and swimming. He had already fallen in love with this young woman who was not only shy and intelligent but also a challenge. It seemed to Joseph that Maria had no intention of going anywhere, and would be hard to remove from her mother’s clutches. When she married him, he knew it would be difficult to move her to America.

  They were married at city hall, on a mid-January morning, nearly a year after he’d arrived in Germany, then afterward had a party at her mother’s house late in the afternoon. Joseph’s mother, Kate Mayer, who had already been traveling through Europe, attended the wedding but remained quiet even during the festivities; she seemed stunned by the whole ordeal. The newlyweds spent a week honeymooning in Berlin, attending the theater and visiting relatives. Then they returned to Göttingen, where Maria finished up her thesis and prepared to take her oral examinations. That she passed was not a surprise, nor was the fact that her mother planned a party to celebrate with family and friends.

  Joseph and Maria decided to leave Germany on March 20, along with Joseph’s mother. While Joseph was very excited to return to America, Maria was apprehensive, knowing that her mother would be fearful for her own future and for Maria’s new life in America. Still, she had to go and leave Germany for what she believed were friendlier shores.

  chapter eight

  The General and the Scientist

  1942

  In the spring of 1942, President Roosevelt instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to begin constructing the factories to manufacture the materials for atomic bombs. The Army Corps of Engineers, a United States federal agency working under the Department of Defense, formed what they called the Manhattan Engineer District, which later became known simply as the Manhattan Project, because the district’s first offices were in Manhattan. The Manhattan Project, in essence, was charged with building the bomb from the ground up, and included some sites where the bomb would be designed and put together.

  On December 28, 1942, President Roosevelt also authorized $500 million for the Manhattan Project—not realizing that this amount would not be enough. From the time it was established to the end of 1946, the project’s cost would jump to $2.2 billion.

  When the official job assignment arrived, General Leslie Groves was not very surprised. He had recently overseen the construction of the Pentagon, and while many had disagreed with the militaristic way he had run that project, he had managed to finish it well before the deadline and to save the government a great deal of money. He would have preferred a new assignment abroad, but as an engineer by training, he understood why officials would consider him the best man to take control of the Manhattan Engineer District. It made him feel good to know that he was so highly thought of as to be given the leadership of such a secret project. And he came to believe that if he couldn’t do it, neither could anyone else.

  General Groves had been sitting in his study in the fall of 1942, looking out at a gorgeous afternoon, when the letter arrived. He was forty-six years old, but his years in the military had given him a weathered, tough exterior that made him appear much older. Most people did not like him, and he knew that. In fact, a handful of them had told him upfront that they found him to be a jerk. He often smiled when remembering those confrontations. He didn’t mind being thought of as arrogant and tough. He had learned early on that when workers respected a leader, they performed their jobs a lot more diligently. He believed that a kinder, friendlier demeanor always brought out the worst in employees, who took advantage of those qualities. And he was not that kind of man.

  He returned to his desk and looked over what the military had sent him: plans of what they wanted him to do. They were trying to build an atomic weapon, and the largest and most secret facilities in the country were needed. He was just the man to handle such a delicate situation. His task was relatively straightforward, if one stopped to think about it: He had to translate all that the government and the scientists needed to do into reality, to make sure that everything was on hand for their vision to come to life. What was so hard about that?

  Glancing over the paperwork again, he realized that even though he was capable of handling the logistical side of the operation, the scientific portion of the plan was clearly out of his league. He did not like dealing with scientists, even if, in his own way, he respected what they were trying to do. He often complained that scientists were unpredictable, that they did not like to take orders, that they did not do what they were told. For their part, they complained that having the colonel hovering over them was not conducive to their work, which was more organic than his strict schedules allowed. He was controlling, they argued.

  He recalled having crossed paths with an ambitious, brilliant, and cocky physicist by the name of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose ferocious intellect had frightened him almost as much as the dreadful hats he paraded around in. But while he thought J. Robert Oppenheimer’s sense of style was terrible, he knew that he was the perfect person to lead the scientific laboratories.

  Oppenheimer was a tall, pale man who had struck Colonel Groves as being lonely. As a young man, Oppenheimer had suffered from tuberculosis, an infectious disease attacking the lungs, at which point his parents had bought a ranch in the mountains of New Mexico as a place for him to recuperate. There, he had whiled away the hours studying Sanskrit. He was brilliant; he knew it, and other people knew it as well. The standards he set for himself were so high that he could never measure up to them, which was why he published his work so rarely; he had deemed only a few of his articles good enough for others to read.

  As soon as General Groves offered him the job, Oppenheimer set about bringing together a large group of young theoretical physicists whom he had either already worked with or met before, most of them hailing from Berkeley. Those who weren’t already devoted to him soon would become loyal friends, moved by his intelligence, his way of speaking, and his incredible store of knowledge. General Groves was caught up in Oppenheimer’s allure.

  General Groves had already decided that the project required several large laboratories. Two ways had been found to fuel an atomic bomb: They could separate the chemically identical isotopes of uranium or produce enough plutonium to create the sustained chain reaction.

  Up until this moment, most experiments had been conducted in university labs scattered across the country. But General Groves didn’t think that was very efficient. If the country was intent on building a superbomb, they needed to have only a handful of working sites
, with more experts located within each one of them.

  He marked several sites on a map with large Xs and folded the paper, ready for his meetings. He felt pleased that all was working according to his plans.

  chapter nine

  American Life

  While Maria Goeppert-Mayer did not like the idea of leaving her mother alone, she knew that her own professional life lay outside Germany. There were few female professors in Germany, and when positions became available, the competition was extremely stiff. Maybe in America it would be easier to achieve her goals.

  Following their wedding, Joseph and Maria Mayer headed to Baltimore, where Joseph Mayer was going to become an associate professor in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. During their transatlantic crossing on the SS Europa, he told her all he could about America, about the long roads crisscrossing the country, the beach he had enjoyed going to in the summers, trout fishing, Hollywood, and about Baltimore, but as much as Maria tried to picture Maryland, she couldn’t. She enjoyed the journey, though she already missed her mother, and an unsettling fear of the United States had quietly overtaken her. That fear was still churning within her stomach when they arrived in New York Harbor on April 1, April Fool’s Day, and she wondered whether that was a bad omen. She tried to get the idea out of her mind, but it followed her when they boarded the train to Baltimore.

  Everything was new: her home, her country, her husband. She felt disoriented. She wrote long letters to her mother every day; however, Frau Goeppert tried give the newlyweds their space by replying only every now and again. But when her mother hadn’t responded in more than one week, Maria paid a tidy sum to phone her, wanting to know why she was not writing. Panicky and jittery, Maria took a while to settle her nerves.

  Although Maria had hoped to work at Johns Hopkins alongside her husband—she set her mind on a teaching job or even a research position—the university gave her a tepid reception and didn’t offer her an official position. A German professor was employed in the physics department, and he needed an assistant to help with his correspondence and office tasks; she could make a few dollars helping him with those.

  She was granted the use of a tiny room—a closet, really—in the science department, where she could work on her own experiments, and this, she knew, had happened only because her husband worked at the university. The lack of space would have been a problem for most other scientists, but she accepted the small room and made the best of it.

  For the moment, she explained in a letter to her mother, they were living in a boardinghouse. They would remain there for a few months to save some money before heading to Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the summer to attend the Summer Symposium in Theoretical Physics. They were going to settle down on their return. Overall, Maria told her mother, she found the United States a difficult country in many respects, and the Americans themselves a rather dull lot. Germany was far more exciting.

  She was also surprised to learn that at Johns Hopkins none of the scientists were engaged in quantum mechanics, a subject that was far advanced in Germany. Maria knew that she would have been able not only to teach the subject at the university level but also to instruct some of the university’s teachers. To keep her mind nimble on the subject, she and her new husband engaged in some experiments at night, though she missed the opportunity to perform them with her fellow scientists.

  After she married Joseph, a side of his personality that she had known about all along became more pronounced: Her husband liked to argue. He particularly liked squabbling about science, abstract ideas, and subjects he thought he could teach her but in which she was already well versed. Maria had no particular liking for animated arguments. She could engage in heated discussions as much as anyone else, but unlike her husband, she didn’t lose her temper. He often managed to make her cry, at which point she would run out of the room and wouldn’t talk to him for hours. Their lives together took some getting used to.

  They arrived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to learn that Enrico Fermi was to lecture on the quantum theory of radiation. And it was on that first day that Maria met Laura Fermi. The Fermis were still living in Italy, and this was their first visit to America. It gave them a preview of what life would be like down the road, after the Fermis made to move permanently to the United States.

  Maria and Laura hit it off right away, and Maria felt that she had found in Laura someone she could become friends with. Maria watched the Italian couple with interest and realized that, much as in her own relationship, Enrico Fermi liked to have the upper hand, while Laura appeared to be very much underinvolved, unlike Maria, who had no intention of allowing Joseph to get away with anything. Joseph, who liked the Fermis, described Enrico as “a very young and pleasant little Italian, with unending good humor, and a brilliant and clear method of presenting what he has to present in terrible English.”

  Following the summer lectures and classes, Joseph and Maria returned to Baltimore, where they rented a tiny house and Maria became intent on learning to cook.

  Before she arrived in America, her mentor, Max Born, had written to his friend in Baltimore, Karl Herzfeld, that Maria would be there soon. Would he be so kind as to look after her? A stiff, shy German, Herzfeld was more than happy to do that. He was also thrilled to teach Maria all he knew about physical chemistry so that they could collaborate on projects together.

  Maria was happy when Frau Goeppert arrived in the United States to spend some time with them. Maria’s mother remained in Baltimore for five months, living in their small but well-decorated house. But before Frau Goeppert left, Maria was already making plans to return to Germany, because Born had offered her a job that would last throughout the summer of 1931. Her husband would not be joining her.

  As with anyone who leaves their home for a new place, Maria, upon her return to Germany, began to make comparisons between Göttingen and Baltimore. Everything seemed much newer and shinier, although chaotic, in the United States. She thought everything looked ancient and old-fashioned in Göttingen, from the kitchens to the bathrooms. Politically, while the winds of change had already started to blow, she made an effort to look the other way and to convince herself that nothing horrible was on the horizon.

  She had not applied to become an American citizen yet, but with the birth of her first child fast approaching, she realized that she wanted her baby to have parents who were American citizens. She worked tirelessly and earned her citizenship in time for the birth. Marianne was born in spring 1933, and while Maria was reveling in Marianne’s giggles and tiny movements, at the same time in Germany the Nazis were enacting the first social laws intended to “clean the civil service.” Nearly two hundred college professors lost their jobs, including Maria’s mentor, Max Born, who left his position at Göttingen voluntarily in support of his colleagues.

  For nearly a year after the birth of her daughter, Maria remained a busy stay-at-home mom, enjoying motherhood and doing very little work in her lab at the university. Motherhood was new and special, and she wanted to cherish it.

  Besides, she often told Joseph—and herself—she was aware that hardly anyone missed her at Johns Hopkins. She also thought that no one appreciated her contributions and that they tolerated her only because of Joseph’s role on the faculty. She was very good in her field and felt secure in that knowledge. But she was never given a voice in university matters; in the department, she was barely more than a volunteer, paid only a few dollars.

  Prior to the birth of her child, she had once made the effort to become a more prominent presence when, noticing an empty office on the physics floor, she had asked the administration if she could have it for herself. While she appreciated the space she had been allotted, it was too small for her needs, she told the officials in the department, as her books and equipment were now overtaking the space. But they had refused her, telling her that the lab she already occupied would have to do. When she asked them how much longer she would have to stay in the small room, they had simply shrugged her off. Deep
down, she had not been surprised by their response. She was one of many individuals at the university who were accepted only because of their spouses’ positions. She knew she could have done so much more. She could have experimented extensively, as she had in Germany, and given more than any of the men, including her husband, if she’d had the opportunity.

  Joseph, for his part, liked the idea of his wife working. It was not because of the money, although that helped. He loved science and knew that he could not live without it, nor could she. He knew that Maria loved the challenge science offered and that she could not do without that mental stimulation, either, as much as she enjoyed her time with their daughter. He encouraged her to return to work, even if only part-time. Maria would have done so anyway without his encouragement, although she was grateful that he understood.

  In 1937, just as Maria returned to work at the university in her old position, she received a distressing telegram from Germany, informing her that her mother was dying. She sailed to Germany on the SS Bremen and arrived home just in time to see Frau Goeppert before she passed away.

  Less than a year later, in 1938, Joseph and Maria Mayer’s son, Peter, was born. She did not enjoy this pregnancy as much as her first, feeling larger and clumsier than ever before. To keep her mind occupied, the idea occurred to her and Joseph to write a textbook. They set to work each evening on an old Corona typewriter, with Maria doing most of the writing. It was supposed to be a quick and easy book, an exercise to keep her mind off her daily grind, but Statistical Mechanics took nearly three years to complete. And it was while working on the book that Joseph Mayer learned that he was being fired from Johns Hopkins.