Calutron Revisited

William Parkins says “the operating company [for the Manhattan Project] was set up as a division of Eastman Kodak called Tennessee Eastman.” That statement implies (inadvertently perhaps) that Tennessee Eastman was established as the operating company of the Manhattan Project.

Tennessee Eastman was actually established in 1920 by George Eastman to produce chemicals for Eastman Kodak’s film and paper manufacturing operations in Rochester, New York. I suspect that Tennessee Eastman was chosen to be the operating company because it was an established local chemical manufacturing company with the necessary managerial infrastructure in place. A more accurate statement might have been, “The operating company was set up as a division of Tennessee Eastman, a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak.”

When I arrived at Kodak in 1951 with a newly minted degree in physics, a number of my fellow workers and some of my bosses had begun their Kodak careers at Oak Ridge.