Louis Slotin
Louis Slotin (1910-1946) was a Canadian-born physicist/chemist who took part on the Manhattan Project. He died of massive radiation poisoning after a laboratory accident.
Louis Slotin was born December 1 1910 in Winnipeg, Canada, to a family of Israel and Sonia Slotin, Yiddish-speaking refugees from Russia. He was the eldest of the three children.
Slotin received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Manitoba 1932 and Master of Science degree 1933. He went to King's College, London University where he received doctorate in physical chemistry 1936. To his friends back home, he managed to give an impression that he had fought for the Spanish Republic and flown with Royal Air Force.
In 1937 Slotin tried to obtain a job with Canada's National Research Council but was not accepted. The University of Chicago accepted him as a research associate later in the year. The job was badly paid and Slotin's father had to support him for two years. On December 2 1942, he was around during the start-up of "Chicago Pile 1", the first man-made reactor but there are conflicting accounts of him being actually present.
In 1942, through professor William D. Harkins of the University of Chicago, Slotin got involved with the Manhattan Project. In December 1944 he moved to Los Alamos to work in the bomb physics group of R.F. Bacher. Technically, he got a leave-of-absence from the University of Chicago.
At Los Alamos, Slotin's duties consisted of criticality testing, first with Otto Frisch's uranium experiments, and then with plutonium cores. Some sources have erroneously claimed that he was involved with triggering devices.
After the war, Slotin's work was still required in the Los Alamos because, as he said, "I am one of the few people left here who are experienced bomb putter-togetherers." He looked forward to resume his research into biophysics and radiobiology at the University of Chicago and was training a replacement, Alvin C. Graves. He received US citizenship in 1946.
In May 1946 Slotin, among others, was in a laboratory doing an experiment that involved creation of the beginning of the fission reaction by bringing two half-spheres of beryllium-coated plutonium close to each other. The experiment was nicknamed "tickling the dragon's tail". Slotin maintained the separation of the half-spheres by a blade of a screwdriver because he apparently distrusted automatic safety mechanisms.
Nine months previously on August 21, 1945, the same cores had produced a burst of ionizing radiation and caused a lethal radiation poisoning to Harry Daghlian, one of the experimenters.
On May 21, the screwdriver slipped, the two hemispheres touched and created a burst of hard radiation. Slotin's instant reaction was to separate the masses by hand, by flipping the upper one on the floor. While he suceeded at ending the critical reaction and shielded seven other observers in the room, he exposed himself to a lethal dose (around 2100 rems) of neutron and gamma radiation, in history's second criticality accident.
Slotin's colleagues rushed him into hospital but Slotin was aware of his condition. His parents were informed and number of volunteers wanted to donate blood but the efforts proved futile. The accident ended all hands-on assembly work at Los Alamos. The incident was classified at first.
Louis Slotin died nine days later in May 30, in the presence of his parents. Two of the other observers also died a couple of years later with symptoms of radiation poisoning.
Louis Slotin was buried in Winnipeg June 2 1946 (thought not in lead coffin, as was later rumored). In 1948, Slotin's colleagues at Los Alamos and the University of Chicago initiated the Louis A. Slotin Memorial Fund for lectures on physics. It lasted until 1962.
