Albert Wattenberg

Albert Wattenberg (April 13, 1917 – June 27, 2007), was an American experimental physicist. During World War II, he was with the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. He was a member of the team that built Chicago Pile-1, the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, and was one of those present on December 2, 1942, when it achieved criticality. In July 1945, he was one of the signatories of the Szilard petition. After the war he received his doctorate, and became a researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory from 1947 to 1950, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1951 to 1958, and at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1958 to 1986, where he pursued studies related to the atomic nucleus.

Early life Albert Wattenberg was born in New York City, New York, on April 13, 1917, the son of Louis and Bella Wattenberg. He had an older brother William (Bill), who helped pioneer the field of educational psychology, as well as a younger brother, Lee, who became a medical researcher. He grew up in New York City, and attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where he helped win the New York math championships. He entered the City College of New York, from which he received his BSc in 1938, and the Columbia University, where he earned his MA in 1939. A politically active student, he organized strikes and a boycott of his own 1938 graduation ceremony in protest against the City College president's Italian Fascist sympathies. After he left Columbia, he took a summer course in spectroscopy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 1939, Wattenberg joined Schenley Industries, a distiller of whiskey, where he performed spectroscopic analysis. He joined US Steel in 1940. The consequential increase in salary and reduction in working hours to 30 hours per week enabled him to go back to graduate school at Columbia University to get his PhD. In 1941, his studies were interrupted by World War II. Enrico Fermi asked him to join the group at Columbia working on the nuclear fission of uranium that also included Herbert L. Anderson, Bernard T. Feld, Leo Szilard and Walter Zinn. Wattenberg learned how to build and maintain the Geiger counters and photon and neutron detectors. The bottle was signed by those present, and kept as a souvenir by Wattenberg. His brother Lee aboard a ship, destined to participate in the invasion of Japan. "Maybe my brother's alive because we used the atomic bomb", he later opined, "Maybe the military was right ... I just wish we had tried a demonstration first." In September 1945, soon after the war ended, he became one of the founders of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, the publishers of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Rather than work in academia, he chose to join Fermi at the Argonne National Laboratory, where he helped design and build nuclear reactors. Wattenberg became director of Argonne's Physics Division in 1949. He died at Clark-Lindsey Village in Urbana, Illinois, on June 27, 2007. He was survived by his wife Alice, daughters Beth, Jill and Nina, and his brother Lee.

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