But he didn’t have to worry, as almost immediately Joseph received two job offers with nearly identical pay: one from Columbia University and one from the University of Chicago. He accepted the Columbia position, but despite their good fortune, Maria could not shake the feeling that she had been in some way the cause of his firing.
It did not help matters that her mentor at the university, Professor Herzfeld, and a handful of her other colleagues saw it similarly. They all agreed that, indirectly, her presence at Johns Hopkins had never been a very good thing for her husband. “There was an antifeminine bias among some faculty in the department,” Herzfeld told her later. “And perhaps the feeling that three Germans—Maria, Franck, and I—were too many.”
But Joseph Mayer didn’t care. He had a new job, a good one at that, and Statistical Mechanics was finished.
When Joseph and Maria moved to New York, they lived across the Hudson River, in Leonia, New Jersey. There they found the Fermis, who had arrived from Italy in January 1939. Leonia, it appeared, was becoming ground zero for physicists, and for that Maria was grateful. Besides, she liked Laura Fermi and enjoyed her friendship, and the Fermis were parents to two young children, just like Joseph and Maria Mayer. They also shared a disdain for the fascist governments in Europe. Their fear and disgust bonded them.
Statistical Mechanics by Mayer and Mayer was ready to be published. But there was a problem. Joseph’s name was to appear on the book as “Joseph Edward Mayer, Associate Professor of Chemistry, Columbia University.” But what about Maria? Maria Goeppert-Mayer, what? She was not working for Columbia University, like her husband. Harold Urey, who ran the chemistry department at Columbia, asked his dean if some sort of job could be found for her, if only for the book’s sake. But his dean balked at the idea of employing her, either to make use of her expertise or to give her the credentials to use next to her byline.
Seeing that his dean would not hire Maria for full-time work, Urey went ahead and hired her himself half-time to lecture to chemistry students. In the end, “Maria Goeppert Mayer, Lecturer in Chemistry, Columbia University,” appeared on the title page. The book, first published in 1940, became an instant classic, solidifying Joseph’s reputation. However, its publication didn’t do anything for Maria. Much as had happened with Marie Curie when she won the Nobel Prize with Pierre Curie, most people, including the officials at Columbia University, mistakenly assumed that Joseph had been entirely or mostly responsible for the book, from its conception to its execution, and that Maria had only assisted on it. It was Joseph’s devotion to his wife that made him want to have her name on the manuscript, the mistaken impression went; it was simply a nod of his love toward her and nothing more.
Following publication of the book, Maria received a job offer from Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York; the school wanted to hire her to teach several science and math courses. She didn’t have much of an opportunity to prepare, but she decided to take the job anyway. And within days, she found herself teaching chemistry to a group of young women who had much difficulty following her presentations.
While she enjoyed her position at Sarah Lawrence, an offer that came later in the spring was far more appealing. Harold C. Urey, who had helped her with her Columbia University credentials, invited her to join a secret project at Columbia, where scientists were working feverishly to separate the isotope uranium-235 from the more widely available uranium-238. Maria had already heard rumors about some sort of massive project the country was involved in, but, being so caught up in her work, she had not been able to confirm those reports. Soon those rumors became confirmed when officials came calling on her. The secret research group, she learned, was called the SAM—for Substitute Alloy Materials—Laboratory, of which Urey had become the director. She readily accepted his offer, liking the idea of being hired on her own merits rather than because she was associated with her husband.
Maria quickly learned that the government was busy working on building an atomic bomb to stop Adolf Hitler. She thought of her beloved Germany and of those who lived there, including her family. What would happen to them if such a bomb were dropped on the country?
As she became more knowledgeable about the project, Maria was aware that the scientists were encountering several challenges while working with uranium, including issues with uranium hexafluoride, which was not only poisonous but also highly corrosive. Scientists had to find some kind of roadblock that would go around pipes, pumps, and anything else surrounding the bomb to keep it sealed. Most scientists were naturally skittish about working with hexafluoride, but Maria was not. She was, by nature, fearless, and Urey knew that.
Initially, she had agreed to work on the project half-time, with weekends to herself so that she could spend some time with her children. She wanted to keep up the routines of an everyday life, while in reality she was involved in a highly classified operation, the magnitude of which she could not even begin to imagine.
As the job went on, she was needed more and more, and balancing home life and work life became more troublesome. She left for work early, often before the children woke up, and arrived home late in the evening. And it was not uncommon for her weekends to be taken over by work duties, too. She missed her children and knew that they waited for her in the evening to play, to share homework, to talk about school projects. But she was too tired to do anything but rest on the sofa. A job that was supposed to be part-time had gradually taken over her existence, though she was happy her contribution was proving valuable.
She was torn about what to tell her young children, if anything, about the work she was performing. How would she be able to explain that it was Hitler that they were fighting, not the Germans themselves, and that the United States had nothing against the German people? That said, how would she be able to explain the thousands of people who would die when the bomb dropped? And how would she be able to explain to her daughter, who was old enough to understand, the role she had played in it? Most of all, how would she be able to live with it herself?
chapter ten
Recruiting
Joan Hinton, a graduate student in the physics department at the University of Wisconsin, entered the laboratory to meet her study group and again noticed that something was out of sorts: Another classmate of hers was missing. Lately Joan Hinton had noted that a handful of her fellow students and several of her professors had disappeared. One day they were around—roaming the halls of the university, reading and correcting their papers, holding their cups of coffee—and the next day they were gone. She had mentioned this strange occurrence to other students, as well as to administrators, asking a litany of questions that began in the morning and ended at night, but all of them, students and faculty alike, had shrugged her off. No explanation was ever given for the disappearances. New teachers replaced the missing professors, but the missing students were never spoken of or seen again.
She suspected something shady was afoot and continued to badger those in charge of the department, but no one would answer her, and her concern continued to grow. Then one day she received a letter; someone quietly slid it under the door while she was studying in her room, sitting on her bed, and by the time she hopped off the bed and reached the door, the person who had delivered the letter was gone, the corridor empty.
The letter was as plain as could be, if not for the word CONFIDENTIAL stamped next to her name. She unsealed it and quickly read the few lines describing some war project taking place in a remote location in New Mexico. Would she be interested in joining? the letter asked. She left her room and looked down the corridor again, the letter flapping in her hand.
It was dark; no one was in the corridor. She closed the door and read the words again. The project sounded fascinating, even though the letter didn’t go into details. Full of the spirit of adventure and optimism that marked her personality, she mentally accepted and right away headed to the library to find a book related to the location in New Mexico where the letter told her she could so
on be heading: Los Alamos.
Having decided to accept the job, Joan realized that there were a few official matters that she needed to deal with. The end of the semester was still some weeks away, but she had to take her final exams before leaving if she hoped to end the school year with good marks.
She was tall, blond, and good-looking—an exuberant young woman known for her eccentricities; there was something about her that surprised people when they learned that she was interested in atomic physics. But it should not have been that astounding. She was smart and witty, and she came from a smart family. Her uncle, G. I. Taylor, was an English physicist and mathematician; and her great-grandfather George Boole was a famous nineteenth-century logician, philosopher, and mathematician who had created Boolean algebra, the basis for computer circuits. She had inherited her smarts.
The day after she received the letter from the Manhattan Project officials, she approached her mathematics professor, Stanislaw Ulam (who would go on to work for the Manhattan Project himself), and asked to take the final examination in classical mechanics a few weeks earlier than scheduled. She told him that she had been hired for some work and that she had been asked to start right away. Professor Ulam didn’t press for more details, nor was he surprised by the request. A handful of other students had made such appeals in the past months.
Joan explained that she had already spoken with the chairman of the department, Professor Ingraham, who had given his permission. Thus, Professor Ulam agreed. He quickly wrote out a list of questions on the back of an envelope and handed it to Joan. She sat on the floor of the office in North Hall, ripped out several sheets of paper from a notepad, and scratched out the answers. She handed them to Professor Ulam and left the office. Then, much like many of her fellow students and professors, Joan left the University of Wisconsin, never to be seen on its grounds again.
chapter eleven
Leona
Leona Woods heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor while wandering the hallways of the University of Chicago, where she was a student. It was early December, and the students and faculty were hurrying to finish up the semester in order to get home to their loved ones and indulge in some much-needed rest. But the sudden bombing in Hawaii put everyone on edge.
Leona was working on her PhD thesis in physics and she loved the program. In 1939, she had attended a seminar held by the Nobel laureate James Franck in which he had spoken on Brillouin zones, and this had inspired her to pursue further studies in physics. At the time of her studies, the chairman of the physics department at the university was Arthur Compton. The Advisory Committee on Uranium had assigned Compton the task of building the chain reaction that would be a part of the graphite-uranium pile project, and he was hard at work on the plan. He was supervising the experimental and theoretical studies looking at how to create the first chain reaction, which would eventually give way to an actual explosion. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, few were aware of Compton’s work. Leona and most of the other students knew him only as the chairperson of their department. While Leona liked Compton, her own professor and thesis chair was another future Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Robert Mulliken.
Leona had started her graduate studies in 1940, working alongside other graduate students who were part of Dr. Mulliken’s group, quietly secluded in the basement of the university. Many members of this advanced class now found themselves being called away to do research for Harold Urey at Columbia University in New York. They had not been told what the research entailed, but they had rushed over to Columbia. Leona had not been asked to join that program, something she resented.
Nonetheless, she was glad to be a part of Dr. Mulliken’s group, although she felt that she was sort of an anomaly there. In early 1936, Dr. Mulliken had stated in an interview that in his opinion, women didn’t show any aptitude for physics, the “father” of all sciences. He had to have realized that there were brilliant women physicists, some of whom had pioneered nuclear research in Europe, research that was the foundation for the work that he himself was now doing and enjoying in Chicago.
However, Dr. Mulliken claimed that there were no women in the United States who could make him change his mind. He hoped that in time he could revise his opinion and see women’s contributions in a better light. But for the moment, he believed women were better off teaching in a classroom than experimenting in a laboratory. Eventually he started reading about the up-and-coming female scientists working in American laboratories and universities, as well as teaching some of those female scientists himself, and his thinking began to evolve.
In 1939, Leona and the rest of the group had attended several seminars held by the university on nuclear fission and a range of similar topics, including methods of separating isotopes. She believed the school would continue to organize such lectures, but as the months wore on, these subjects became classified, and scientists were urged not to publish information or even talk about these matters as part of a lecture series. The information given to the students became scantier and scantier. The students noticed this development, talked about it, and wondered why it was occurring.
Aside from being the director of the Chicago lab, Arthur Compton was also a dean in the physics department, and one of the perks of the job was the freedom to get office space and materials for his students, especially laboratory space for those who worked for him, and thus he was very well liked. The physics department shared Eckhart Hall with the math department, but it soon outgrew its space, and Compton pushed the math department to move out, whereupon he barricaded the hall and had it guarded; its doors were eventually sealed, and an armed guard was even posted outside.
Leona observed everything occurring around her with interest. For the third time, she was rewriting her thesis, which Dr. Mulliken was supervising, and while she tried to concentrate on her work, the construction occurring around her also caught her attention. Everything intrigued her, and the secrecy made her wonder.
Compton was considered an extremely good-looking man, who worked hard to keep himself in shape by playing many rounds of tennis and walking several times a day. He was gracious and had the capacity to overlook defects in people. He often invited coworkers and students to his home, and several of the students ended up renting the third floor of the large house where he lived with his wife, Betty. One of the renters included the physicist John Marshall.
Leona had noticed John Marshall at the start of the semester, while deeply involved in her molecular spectroscopy work. John was a scientist, Leona Woods knew, with an intriguing mix of intelligence, interesting looks, and geekiness. Maybe it was because most people described her—a tall young woman with pale skin and an odd hairdo—in similar terms that she felt a connection to him. She learned through some intense inquiries that John was a staff member in Enrico Fermi’s laboratory.
These scientists had joined the Substitute Alloy Materials Laboratory when it was originally established at Columbia University; when the Metallurgical Laboratory was established at the University of Chicago, the scientists had moved to Chicago. Leona knew that Leo Szilard, Walter Zinn, Herbert Anderson, and Edward Teller were also involved. The laboratory was so new that she watched as more equipment arrived daily. Because the staff didn’t have enough supplies, most of them resorted to helping themselves to whatever materials—glue, pliers, and tweezers—they needed from other departments, promising to return them but never doing so. Leona eventually became the leader of this band of nerdy thieves, her wide pockets always full of office supplies that her coworkers had asked her to retrieve.
Leona had made up her mind to meet John Marshall. So one afternoon, as she was crossing the hallway on her way to the lab, she cornered him while he was smelting metal bricks. John was not a very tall man, but Leona thought him a very handsome one. He came from a large and prosperous family, his father being John Marshall Sr., the director of the DuPont Fabrics and Finishes Department. Szilard had recruited John to Columbia University, but when operations moved to the Unive
rsity of Chicago, so had John. He had already finished his doctoral work and looked forward to the challenges that lay ahead.
Flashing a crooked but confident smile, Leona told him that she knew about the government project he and his team were working on and that she had also heard through the university grapevine that they had discovered how chain reaction worked. And it was true; the sharing of information between students had allowed Leona to keep herself up to date, and whatever she had not been able to learn with certainty, she was capable of figuring out. She clearly suspected what her former classmates and colleagues who had been called to New York had been working on, and she was almost sure of what was being tested at the university. Her certainty showed while she talked with John.
John Marshall was immediately startled, not only because his group had tried to keep their work secret, but also because this young woman, who was obviously very familiar with the sciences and with him, seemed so brash, so much bolder than most women he knew. He was not alone in that opinion. Leona had a reputation for being brazen and blunt; for speaking up when the mood struck her, without a filter between her brain and her tongue; for spewing out ideas that were unpopular, whether scientific ones or personal ones. Not everybody liked her, and she did not mind that. John simply stared at her, eventually leaving her standing in the hallway without saying much of anything. This would become a recurring problem in their relationship, one Leona would not be able to tolerate.
The following day, while changing classes, Leona was approached by Enrico Fermi. She had heard about the Italian Nobel laureate, of course, but had never spoken to him. She was surprised by how short he was; in fact, he stood only about five feet six inches tall, and Leona was much taller than him, nearly six feet tall herself. By then, Fermi had lost most of his dark hair, but he still retained his powerful body, and his blue eyes—which his wife often said were set too close together—were as playful as ever. His shoulders were rounded, with a slight stoop, probably from spending so many hours poring over theoretical problems, and his skin was a pale olive color. Those who didn’t know him would have mistaken him for just another random professor crossing the hallways.
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