Manhattan Project: People > Scientists > Eugene Wigner

EUGENE WIGNER

(Chemical engineer, Met Lab, director of Clinton Laboratory at Oak Ridge, 1946-1947)
People > Scientists

Eugene Paul Wigner was born in Budapest, Hungary, on November 17. 1902, into a middle class family of Jewish heritage. His father was director and minority owner in a leather factory. He attended the Lutheran high school in Budapest where he met and became friends with the mathematician John von Neumann. In 1920, he went to Berlin to study, at the encouragement of his father, chemical engineering at the Technische Hochschule, while in his spare time focusing on mathematics and his primary interest, physics. He earned a doctorate in 1925 and returned to Budapest and took a job working as a leather chemist in his father's factory. At the same time, Wigner kept up with the latest developments in physics, including quantum mechanics, and, unhappy in his new job, he accepted in 1926 a research assistantship at the University of Berlin. After a year at Göttingen, he returned in 1928 to Berlin, and in 1930 he and von Neumann accepted half-time positions at Princeton University, one semester a year at Princeton and one at Berlin. In 1933, with the rise of the Nazis, Wigner lost his position at Berlin and became full-time at Princeton. He spent two years at the University of Wisconsin before returning in 1938 to Princeton where he would remain for the rest of his academic career. He became a United States citizen in 1937 and brought his parents to America in 1939.

With the discovery of fission in uranium by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman in December 1938, Wigner became among the earliest and most persistent advocates for federal support for uranium research. Wigner and his fellow Hungarian émigrés Edward Teller and Leo Szilard, who had been a good friend since his years in Berlin, were fearful that an atomic bomb was possible and might be developed by Nazi Germany. These fears prompted the three in July 1939 to approach Albert Einstein and convince him to attach his name to a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning of the potential threat of atomic weapons and the need for government support for research. Roosevelt, in response to the Einstein letter, created a committee on uranium research. The committee convened on October 21, 1939, with Wigner and his fellow Hungarians in attendance. A skeptical Colonel Keith Adamson, the Army representative, observed that it usually took two wars to develop a new weapon and, in any event, it was morale and not new arms that brought victory. Wigner replied that if armaments were so comparatively unimportant, perhaps the Army's budget ought to be cut by thirty percent. "All right," snapped Adamson, "you'll get your money." Limited government support was soon forthcoming.

Wigner remained at Princeton as leader of a new research group studying the theory of the chain reaction and collaborated with Szilard and Enrico Fermi in their efforts at Columbia University to produce a chain reaction using natural uranium. In early 1942, Arthur Compton consolidated most fission research at his new Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at his home campus at the University of Chicago. He designated Fermi, Samuel K. Allison, and Wigner as coordinators of the research, experimental, and theoretical aspects of the chain reaction. With his background in chemical engineering, Wigner brought an important perspective to problems relating to the design and engineering of nuclear reactors. A full-scale production reactor for plutonium it was soon clear to both the scientists and engineers, would differ significantly in design from Fermi's planned experimental pile (CP-1) to prove the chain reaction. Radiation and containment shielding would be necessary, as would a cooling system and a method for removing the irradiated uranium without dismantling the reactor. Several designs for a full-scale reactor were proposed in summer 1942. The lead candidate was a reactor cooled with helium, which absorbed few neutrons but as a gas possessed less effective coolant properties. Wigner feared that such a design choice would mean that the reactor would run very hot-presenting potential complications from the perspective of the chemical properties of materials-and favored ordinary water as a coolant. Water would be an effective coolant with fewer complications, and, perhaps most importantly given the wartime urgency, it would likely make a reactor available much sooner. The downside of using water was that it did not have especially good nuclear properties, tending to absorb neutrons, and corroded uranium rapidly.

Reactor design choice depended to a considerable extent on the outcome of Fermi's pile experiment. One of the main goals was to determine the precise value of the neutron reproduction factor "k" for a theoretical reactor of infinite size. If the value of k was high, it would favor the water-cooled design because an excess of neutrons would offset those lost through the use of water. On December 2, 1942, CP-1 first achieved a self-sustaining fission chain reaction. As Fermi shut the reactor down, Wigner produced a bottle of Chianti wine from behind his back, and paper cups were passed around for everyone to drink. The scientists held up their cups in a silent toast. All of them but Wigner signed the bottle's label. As important as proving the chain reaction, Fermi's experiment demonstrated a higher value for the neutron reproduction factor k than anyone had anticipated.

By the end of 1942, Wigner and his team, which included Alvin M. Weinberg and Gale Young, had effectively completed design of a full-scale, water-cooled production reactor. In late November, however, General Leslie Groves had persuaded the DuPont Corporation to take responsibility for the final design and construction of the production reactors. The company's initial evaluation of designs ranked helium first and water last. Wigner submitted the full design plan to DuPont in January 1943. DuPont still had doubts about the water-cooled design, but it also was growing increasingly wary of the helium design and by mid-February dropped it altogether. Nonetheless, not until after three months of additional study did the company decide on the water-cooled design for the production reactors that would be built at Hanford, Washington. Wigner was not pleased. DuPont's indecision on the water-cooled design was troubling, and the company had made no move to invite Wigner and his group to join the DuPont design group. The company consulted on isolated theoretical problems, but Wigner realized that DuPont had no intention of giving the Met Lab a free hand in designing the Hanford reactors or the air-cooled reactor to be built at the X-10 site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. By February, Wigner had lost all hope. If he was to be frozen out of the reactor project, he saw no vital work left for him at the Met Lab. Willing to consider that his earlier opposition to bringing in DuPont might be responsible for the company's aloofness, Wigner offered his resignation. Compton persuaded Wigner instead to take a month's leave of absence. Although tensions continued to exist between Wigner's group and DuPont, relations between the two groups eased with a growing sense of mutual respect.

Wigner remained at the Met Lab for the remainder of the war. In addition to collaborating with DuPont on development of both the X-10 and Hanford reactors, Wigner's group pursued research efforts on a heavy water-cooled reactor design. In late 1944, Wigner drew up a plan for an expanded postwar laboratory for nuclear research at the Clinton Laboratories on the X-10 site at Oak Ridge, with as many as 3500 personnel and an associated school of reactor technology. He pushed to have his Met Lab group transferred as a unit to Oak Ridge. When this was not done, he persuaded Weinberg and others of his staff to move to Oak Ridge, starting in May 1945. In 1946, Wigner became co-director of the Clinton lab as head of research. He focused on establishing a training program for nuclear scientists and engineers and establishing an expert team to design experimental and power reactors. He also oversaw in 1946 the first of thousands of radioisotope shipments, produced in the X-10 reactor, initiating a program of enormous value to medical, biological, and industrial science. He left the lab, which would eventually become the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and returned to Princeton in summer 1947. He continued to be a consultant to the lab and served on the Atomic Energy Commission's technical advisory body, the General Advisory Committee, from 1952-1957, and again from 1959-1964. He earned the Nobel Prize in physics in 1963 for his work on symmetries in quantum mechanics. Wigner retired from his post at Princeton University in 1971 but remained an active member of the scientific community as a visiting scholar and consultant. Eugene Wigner died January 1, 1995.

Sources and notes for this page

The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources. Major sources consulted include the following. Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946: Volume I, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), 16, 20, 23, 54-56, 113, 174-82, 186, 193-95, 197-98, 201, 203-4, 635-36; Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield, 1947-1952: Volume II, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), 28, 38-39, 68-69, 71, 103; Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb, United States Army in World War II (Washington: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1988), 187-98; Arthur M. Compton, Atomic Quest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 26-28, 81, 83, 143, 167-71, 184; Oak Ridge National Laboratory: The First 50 Years, 1943-1993, Chapters 1 and 2; Frederick Seitz, Erich Vogt, and Alvin M. Weinberg, Eugene Paul Vigner, 1902-1995, A Biographical Memoir (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1998), 4-11, 13-21; Interviews with Eugene P. Wigner by Thomas S. Kuhn, November 21, December 3 and 14, 1963, American Institute of Physics. See also, Eugene P. Wigner, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner as told to Andrew Szanton (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 1992). All three photographs of Wigner appear courtesy Oak Ridge National Laboratory.