Obituary of Albert Wattenberg

Albert Wattenberg who died at the age of 90 on June 27, 2007, in Urbana, Illinois, was a member of the team led by Enrico Fermi who built the first successful nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago, at the beginning of the Manhattan Project. Al was one of the signatories of the Szilard Petition. He was among the founders of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, formed in 1945 by scientists on the Manhattan Project. Al became a leading experimental particle physicist, a great teacher, and a warm and wonderful friend to his many colleagues.

Al grew up in New York City. His first interest in science came from his brother, a chemist, who trained Al to keep his glassware very clean. Al received his B.Sc. from City College (1938), and his M.A. from Columbia (1939). He became politically engaged during college and organized several strikes. He was the president of his senior class but did not attend his graduation protesting the pro-Italian fascist sentiments of the City College president.

Al’s first job was spectroscopic analysis at the Schenley Corporation. At the same time, he continued graduate study at Columbia. In 1941 Al was close to finishing his Ph.D. when the war effort intervened. Fermi invited Al to join his group studying the fission of uranium. A young and talented instrumentalist, Al learned to use Geiger counters, and also served as draftsman and machinist. He learned to build photon and neutron detectors. After 1943, he made and maintained all the radium and beryllium sources for the entire Manhattan Project. He measured the neutron activity in the uranium graphite structure. Here, Al observed Fermi’s thoroughness in experimental work, an example that affected his approach to experiments for the rest of his life.

In 1942, Fermi’s group moved to the University of Chicago where, on December 2, they obtained the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Eugene Wigner presented Fermi with a bottle of Chianti, which everybody present signed. Al cleaned up after the event and kept the historical bottle.

Al was only in his mid-twenties when he was put in charge of the group testing the purity of all the uranium and heavy water used in the project. He stayed at Argonne when Fermi moved to Los Alamos.

Al completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1947 and stayed at Argonne to work with Fermi on building reactors to produce intense neutron beams. Neutron diffraction, facilitated by these beams, has had an enormous impact on materials science, biology, medicine, and chemistry.

In 1949, Al became acting director of the Physics Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Al’s interest in research in elementary particles, together with the growing intense anti-Communist scrutiny of government employees during the late 1940s, led him to leave Argonne in 1950 for the University of Illinois and then MIT. At the MIT synchrotron, he studied properties of nucleons and worked on K-mesons.

In 1958, the University of Illinois recruited Al with a prestigious research professorship. Al remained at Illinois until his retirement in 1986, and led the group for almost 20 years. In the Fifties and Sixties, Al studied K-mesons, looking for violations of time reversal, CP, and CPT. He designed and built Cerenkov counters at Fermilab and quantum mechanics experiments for the teaching laboratories at Illinois. He worked on J/ψ and charm production at Fermilab, with neutron beams (E358) and with wide-band photon beams (E87, an important experiment that showed the hadronic nature of J/ψ), and later at SLAC, in the first comprehensive study of the charm sector (Mark III). The construction of the 700-counter muon detector for the Mark III detector was Al’s last particle physics project. Al and his colleagues at Illinois developed a strong and convivial particle physics group, known for its superb electronics capabilities.

After retirement, Al participated in the Forum on the History of Physics of the APS. He was the editor of the Forum’s newsletter. Al participated in the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security at the University of Illinois and contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Over the years, he gave numerous talks about the beginnings of the nuclear era and about his work with Fermi. In 2001, he contributed to the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Enrico Fermi’s birth at the University of Chicago.

Al’s first wife Shirley Hier died in 1989. Al is survived by his wife Alice von Neumann, one brother, three daughters, nine grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.