Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How Women Won WWII: The Booming Work of Women Scientists

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

In a previous episode of our series, we had a conversation about the combined efforts of the Allied science community to beat Germany in the race to understand and build atomic weapons. It was a team effort, and you know what? We barely scratched the surface. Today, we’ll peek into the minds of some of the greatest women scientists during World War II. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome. Welcome to episode six of our documentary series, How Women Won World War II. In a previous episode, we began a conversation about the combined efforts of the allied science community to beat Germany in the race to understand and build atomic weapons. It was a team effort, and you know what? We barely scratched the surface. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. In 1993, a set of transcripts was released. It was a set of transcripts about something only a select number of people even knew existed. Historians waited with bated breath to crack open the pages, a documentation of secret conversations among some of the world's top atomic scientists. Secret conversations that the scientists didn't even realize

anyone was recording. But before we get to the secret conversations, we need to talk more about how atomic science developed. Because without the contributions of women, all I can tell you is that the world would be a very different place than it is today. Now, I get that from our current perspective, it seems like the world may be better off without nuclear weapons. And I'm not even going to argue with you. But we also can't project our current beliefs onto the past as inherently true and correct, and assume that everyone else was working with the same set of facts and information, the same beliefs and morals that we have. Because unless we've lived during the Holocaust where 6 million Jews were killed,

unless we witnessed firsthand the incarceration of innocent Japanese Americans or the Pearl Harbor attack on U.S. soil, or watched as tens of thousands of young men were sent overseas with notes pinned inside their coats for good luck, unless we've lived through those exact set of circumstances, we can't judge. To many, the development of the atomic bomb was a blessing. It was a relief. It put an end to years of war and torture. It also changed the course of the future. At the beginning of World War II, the United States was not a world superpower. And I know we like to think of ourselves as always and forever the greatest nation that has ever been. But in terms of the U.S. military, the United States was 19th in the world at the outbreak of World War II.

We had a smaller military than Portugal. than Portugal. It was the development of the atomic weapon that changed our position in the world, for better or for worse. And after we dropped the atomic bomb, we were no longer young, scrappy, and hungry. The United States had arrived. The Allies were terrified that Hitler would make the bomb before they did, so it was in their minds, truly a race against an unspeakable evil that might befall the world if he did. And the truth is, nuclear physics is what it is because of the scientific contributions of women. The war ended because of the scientific contributions of women. The United States became who and what it is in the world because of the scientific contributions of women. And I'm about to tell you how.

Let's revisit Europe at the end of the 19th century. A baby named Lise was born in 1878 in Austria. She was one of eight children, but her parents immediately saw how bright she was, and she sailed through all the schooling Austria had to offer by age 14. Her father, an attorney, hired private tutors so she could continue her studies. She was only the second woman to receive a PhD from the University of Vienna, and she was working in a field in which women were traditionally excluded. Physics. Lise moved to Berlin and studied under the father of quantum theory, Max Planck, and met her future longtime collaborator, the chemist Otto Hahn. Lise also rubbed elbows with other science giants like Marie Curie and

Albert Einstein. By the way, there is a growing body of evidence that Einstein's first wife, who was also a scientist, was responsible for at least assisting in the development of a lot of his early work. It's work she is completely uncredited for. And Lise Meitner experienced many of the same discriminatory attitudes. experienced many of the same discriminatory attitudes. She often wasn't permitted to be in the room where it happened. She had to work alone in a basement laboratory. But her friendship with Otto Hahn grew,

and she was able to use her proximity to him to get herself out of the basement and into the good laboratories. Together, they made important discoveries, and she was able to publish her work under her own name. Lise was Jewish, and she saw the writing on the wall as the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s. Even though she didn't practice religious Judaism and would later convert to Christianity, she had a second strike against her. She was a scientist. In the coming years, the Nazis sought to destroy people of talent and intellect unless they agreed to work for the Nazi agenda. She had no choice but to flee Germany before it was too late, leaving behind the world's premier physics laboratory in Berlin.

She moved to Sweden, which remained neutral in World War II. It was during a walk in the snowy woods of Sweden with her nephew and fellow scientist Otto Frisch that Lise made one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in the history of physics. As the pair discussed recent advances in nuclear science, the million-dollar question of, could you split an atom, came up. And it was there, in the Swedish countryside, as they built upon science done by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, that Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch figured out the process of nuclear fission.

Lise imagined the nucleus of uranium being like a giant drop that could be squeezed and split into multiple parts, which would then produce energy. and split into multiple parts, which would then produce energy. She called her former colleague Otto Hahn, along with his working partner Fritz Strassmann, and together they confirmed her theory. The world changed forever on that afternoon walk, because Lise Meitner's work on nuclear fission was, in part, the basis for all nuclear energy development, including the energy that went into making atomic weapons. Because history has traditionally ignored and excluded women, and because theoretical physicist was not a field many

women were welcomed into in the early and mid-20th century, it would be easy to think that the story ends there, that Lise was one remarkable woman who defied the odds. But you'd be wrong. There was another woman working in that Berlin physics lab with Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn before Lise fled to Sweden, and her name was Elisabeth Rona. Elisabeth grew up in Budapest, and her father was a physician who constantly researched and tested new inventions and technologies. Rona especially loved his x-ray machine, which was one of the first in Hungary. She knew she wanted to pursue science, and she earned her PhD in chemistry in 1912. Her study of radioactivity is what Rona became known for. She discovered that seawater and ocean

sediments are radioactive, and found that this allowed her to view the ocean as a clock, to be able to look back in time to the formation of the earth, a concept known as geochronology. We know that when Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the importance of radium, the supply was very limited and consequently very expensive, which limited the research and experiments that labs could undertake. Marie's one gram of radio from the United States could only take radioactive research so far, which meant that the hunt was on for other radioactive elements, and Elizabeth Rona's work filled in the gaps. Elizabeth discovered a way to prepare the element polonium so it could be used as a stand-in for radium in many experiments. Elizabeth, who was also Jewish in a world fraught

with antisemitism, moved from place to place to perform her research, from Sweden to Paris to Berlin, but the Nazis. She was forced to leave Europe, marked as a double threat to the rise of fascism. She was Jewish, and she was a scientist. Elizabeth fled to the United States, and she was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. Early contributions to the world of physics didn't start with Lise and Elisabeth. They both relied heavily on another scientific great, Marie Curie, who we mentioned discovered radioactivity, founded schools in Paris, and became the only person to ever have received two Nobel Prizes in different fields. In fact, Marie Curie discovered polonium and named it after her home country of Poland. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre were

so busy with their science lab in the late 1800s that for a time, they left their oldest daughter Irene in the care of her grandfather, who was a retired doctor. When Pierre died, Marie raised her daughters as a single parent. When you see pictures of Irene Curie as a young adult with her mother in a lab, they don't look like women who are used to fame and discovery. Instead, you see the mother and daughter seated near each other. They wear long, dark dresses and have their hair pulled back into the 1920s version of a messy bun with strands falling loose around their faces. They sit in wooden chairs at wooden tables, and in one image you can see what looks to be a folded piece of paper stuffed under a table leg to make the table level.

The humanity of these women with their unassuming appearances and humble laboratories, it's an incredible reminder of how humans have a tendency to elevate people to hero status and plaster their cartoon likeness on t-shirts and other merch. We forget to remember the truth, that Marie Curie was one of the most talented scientific minds that has ever been. She was also once a young widow and a single mother who faced relentless criticism from the right-wing French press who labeled her as a foreigner and a Jew and an atheist. In fact, Marie Curie was not actually Jewish, but that again speaks to anti-Semitism in the world. To call someone a Jew

was seen by some as an insult. Irene grew to be an incredible scientific mind. She too won a Nobel Prize, an honor she shared with her husband when they discovered a way to transform one element into another artificially using radioactivity. In Arend's teen years, she ran mobile hospital units in World War I, training medical staff on how to use her mother's x-ray technology, which saved untold lives as doctors were able to locate shrapnel invisible to the naked eye, which would previously have caused infection, sepsis, and death.

When World War I ended, Irene began working on her PhD at the Radium Institute, and her mother asked her to train a man named Frederick Joliot. The two became not just scientific research partners, but they married, combined their last names to Joliot-Curie, and released all of their research jointly. In fact, the Joliot-Curies discovered the existence of positrons and neutrons, but they didn't know enough to know it at the time.

Before the Joliot-Curies figured out how to transform one element into another using radioactivity, scientists had to extract naturally occurring radioactive materials from the earth, which, as we mentioned before, made the materials costly and rare. Being able to make the materials in the lab opened up entire worlds of scientific exploration. Radioactive isotopes are still widely used to this day in the world of medicine. It was their work that set the stage for Lees-Meitner to discover nuclear fission, the separating of atoms to create a tremendous amount of energy. The Joliot-Curie's brilliant minds that they were also saw the writing on the wall. They became terrified of

what could happen if their work fell into the wrong hands, specifically the hands of fascist armies springing up in Germany and Italy. Toronto's Blue Bin Recycling Program ensures the majority of the right items are recovered and transformed into new products. Recycling right is important and impactful. Let's work together and make a difference, because small actions lead to big change. For more tips on recycling, visit toronto.ca slash recycle right. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends.

And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio! studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every

episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. While Marie, Irene, Elizabeth, and Lise laid the groundwork for future nuclear advances, their contemporaries in the United States stood on their shoulders using everything they had learned and then building on it. Leona Woods was born in 1919 and her parents knew she was going to make something of herself when she graduated from high school at 14 and earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago at the age of 19. Five years later, she had a PhD in chemistry. Before she could even finish her PhD dissertation, she was hired by researcher Enrico

Fermi and joined a group of scientists at the Chicago Metallurgical Lab, called the Met Lab, who were attempting something that no one had ever done before. Building a nuclear reactor at the behest of the U.S. government's Manhattan Project. And what better place to put it than underneath the University of Chicago's abandoned football stadium. Their build worked. Leona Woods was the first and only woman present when the reactor was powered up. And just to give you an idea of the scope of this project, which was called Chicago Pile 1 or CP1, here is a description.

It was 20 feet high and 25 feet wide, and it consisted of 57 layers of material with 380 tons of graphite, 50 tons of tube alloy oxide, and 6 tons of tube alloy metal. And remember, this was done in complete secrecy. They wanted to find out if nuclear fission could be created using the prototype they designed. Leona Woods stood in the cold Chicago air at age 23, taking measurements of neutron activity using a counter that she had designed for the task.

Leona got married the following year to fellow scientist John Marshall and was quickly pregnant with their first child. She was terrified that her pregnancy would be discovered and that she would be kicked out of the building that now housed the reactor they were working on. So she hid her pregnancy. She wore baggy denim clothes stuffed with tools to make it seem like they were the reason she was larger than normal. And when morning sickness hit, she discreetly vomited into trash cans when no one was around. After the baby was born, Leona returned to work just days later. John and Leona moved with their son to Hanford, Washington,

where the government was building large-scale plutonium reactors. By the way, plutonium is made by nuclear reaction with uranium used as fuel. When they powered up the B reactor at the Hanford, Washington site, Leona stood by, watchful. It was the world's first large reactor, and the room was full of big shots and officials all there to witness the event. The B Reactor hissed to life, water heating, control rods moving, and then a few hours later, it died. Everyone was stressed because, remember, this was not a science project. This was literally a race against time. The United States needed to beat Germany in its quest to build the bomb. To fail to do so would mean disaster of an unspeakable scale. Scientists couldn't figure out what was wrong with the reactor, and they felt the gravity of the situation pressing on them from all sides. It was Leona

who finally helped diagnose the problem, poison xenon gas. It took them months to craft a solution. Leona knew she was working on building a nuclear weapon, but 99% of employees in Hanford believed that they worked for a company called Hanford Engineering Works, and they had no knowledge of precisely why they were doing what they were doing. Did Leona have qualms about working on the Manhattan Project? She later said, I think everyone was terrified that we were wrong in our way of developing the bomb and that the Germans were ahead of us. That was a persistent and ever-present fear, fed, of course, by the

fact that our leaders knew those people in Germany. They went to school with them. Our leaders were terrified, and that terror fed to us. If the Germans had got it before we did, I don't know what would have happened to the world. Germany led in the field of physics in every respect. It was a very frightening time. I think it's important to take a moment to highlight the danger of this kind of work. And not just danger on a global scale if weapons were developed and fell into the wrong hands, but actual physical danger. People died doing this work. Some died in the midst of research, others years later from illness related to exposure from dangerous elements. Louis Slotin, a physicist at Los Alamos in New Mexico, was performing an experiment

when a screwdriver slipped, a neutron reflector fell, and it created a burst of radiation. Seven scientists watched, and as if in slow motion, the room filled with a blue glow. Warmth flushed their cheeks, and a sour taste filled their mouths. Louis had been exposed to an incredible dose of neutron radiation and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors urgently called the physicist's parents, imploring them to get on a plane to New Mexico. Over the next four days, Louis suffered what historians call an agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas. He had severe diarrhea followed by intestinal paralysis and gangrene, and his skin grew severely blistered on the outside from radiation burns. The inside of his body was also blistered with what doctors described as a

three-dimensional sunburn. His hands swelled massively, his lips turned blue, and his mental confusion increased. Nine days after the accident, Louis experienced a total disintegration of bodily functions, slipped into a coma, and died. functions, slipped into a coma, and died. And so when one of the seven scientists who was in the room when Louis had his fatal accident became severely sickened, his wife went on high alert. Alvin Graves stayed in the hospital for weeks after being poisoned by radiation from the accident, and he never fully recovered back to his old self. Alvin met his wife, Elizabeth Graves, who went by the nickname Diz when they were both PhD students in physics at the University of Chicago. In 1939, Al got a job at the University of Texas, but they had

rules against married couples working at the same institution, so they refused to hire Diz. working at the same institution, so they refused to hire Diz. And let's be real, misogyny played a part in that refusal as well. Instead, Diz helped him prepare his lectures behind the scenes and gave him input to flesh out his research. The couple eventually had enough of Diz not being able to use her intellect to its fullest capacity, and they moved back to the University of Chicago to work in the Met Lab. When they received an offer to join a team on a secret project in Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1943, Al and Diz Graves jumped at the chance. Diz's expertise was in fast neutron scattering, and this became a crucial part of nuclear weapon design. She was given a job at Los Alamos not as an associate scientist like most women,

but as a ranking scientist, which was a higher title. And in July 1945, Diz was there for the moment that her work in creating a neutron reflector for the core of the bomb became a booming reality. Historians describe what it was like the night the United States tested the first ever nuclear weapon called Trinity. In cabin four, the Graves spread out their equipment on the creaky double bed and told the inquiring owner that they were on a cross-country trip and would stay only two nights. Al Graves anxiously watched his wife puttering with the Geiger counter that rested on the windowsill facing Trinity 40 miles westward. Diz Graves was seven months pregnant, and Al worried that the strain of the last hours might injure her health. He put a steady arm around her and drew her to him.

Over the shortwave set, they could hear Sam Allison conversing excitedly with the pilot of the B-29. The Graves made a last check of their instruments, and then together they waited. Like Leona Woods, Diz worked until the moment she gave birth, timing her contractions with the stopwatch she used to conduct lab experiments. After immigrating to the United States, Elizabeth Rona was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship to continue studying the radioactivity of seawater. This caught the attention of higher-ups at the Manhattan Project, and when they discovered the military needed a lot of polonium to trigger the fission needed to detonate an atomic bomb, they approached her. Without compensation, Elizabeth gave the Manhattan Project her methods for concentrating polonium. When the Nazis began their fateful march across the continent of Europe,

Irene and Pierre Joliot-Curie were terrified their work would be seized and fall into the wrong hands, allowing the Nazis to develop weapons. So they locked up their work in a vault. For ten years, they purposely made no scientific discoveries. In 1949, they finally took it back out and began working on non-weapon nuclear developments. While officials tried to recruit the brilliant mind of Lise Meitner to the Manhattan Project in 1942, she refused, saying she wanted nothing to do with the bomb. She lived the rest of her life in Sweden, having received no official recognition for her discovery of nuclear fission. But her scientific partner, Otto Hahn, did. He received the Nobel Prize. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Nobel

Committee couldn't contact him, and he found out about it in the press. Why, you might ask, Why, you might ask, could the Nobel Committee not send world-renowned scientist Otto Hahn a congratulatory telegram informing him of his award? I'll tell you. It's because after the war ended, the United States had to know. Did we barely win the race? How far did Germany advance in their scientific research? Did the Nazis have an atomic weapons program? To find that out, the Allies rounded up 10 of Germany's top atomic scientists, including Otto Hahn.

They transported them to an estate in England called Farm Hall. And there, for six months, the Allies secretly recorded these German scientists as they lived together. The scientists didn't even know for sure why they were there. One of the reasons they speculated about was the Allies were trying to keep them safe from the Soviet Union. After six months, the Allies made transcripts of the portions of the tapes they deemed important, and then they destroyed the tapes themselves. The transcripts were classified until 1993. We now know that, no, Germany was not at all close to developing an atom bomb. They had never even built a nuclear reactor capable of such a thing. But what was even more fascinating were some of the questions the scientists who were interned discussed amongst themselves. They didn't know they were

being recorded. Someone joked shortly after they arrived that maybe there were recording devices, and then someone else answered that the Allies were no Nazis. They were too backward to have done something as devious as bugging a house in the English countryside. Two copies of the farm hall transcripts exist, one in England and one in the U.S. National Archives, and researchers had a field day when they were declassified. They identified four central questions that the scientists brought up over and over. Were we Nazis? Did we know how to make atomic bombs?

Could Germany have created nuclear weapons under the Nazis? Were we trying to produce atomic bombs? Imagine not knowing if you were a Nazi or not. It seems impossible today to be unaware. While Lise Meitner was sparing herself the fate of being killed by the Nazis, Otto Hahn found himself wondering if he even was one. And then he received the scientific community's most prestigious award for work that found its genesis in Lise's mind. While Lise was snubbed by the Nobel Committee, Otto gave her a portion of his prize money when he won.

Lise, in turn, gave the money to an organization that worked against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Lise was nominated for a Nobel Award 48 times, but never received even one. She did have a chemical element named after her, mitinarium, and she is one of only two women to have received that honor. Marie Curie is the other one. Otto Hahn later tried to deny that Lise Meitner had anything to do with the discovery of nuclear fission, attempting to rewrite history and to cast the scientific community in Nazi Germany in a purely benevolent role. Meitner realized what Hahn was doing. He suppresses the past with all his might, she wrote to a friend.

Even though he always truly hated and despised the Nazis, as one of his main motives is to gain international respect for Germany once again, he deceives himself about the facts. And oh, what a human statement. He deceives himself about the facts. We can say the same about the authors of history many thousands of times over. Join me next time as I talk about another master deceiver,

a woman spy master who oversaw hundreds of secret agents in the fight against the Nazis. I'll see you again soon. Thank you for listening to Hero's Work. It's interesting. This show is written and researched by Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and is hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.