JOHN WHEELER
granted a leave of absence to go to Chicago to work with Fermi
on the first nuclear reactor, he would have to resign. He was
granted a leave. His next problem was to find lodging in Chicago
for himself and his family. All the real estate agents there told
him that nothing was available. ‘‘Finally,’’ he explained to me, ‘‘I
adopted the practice of walking along a street, any street, and
spotting a house I thought would be a nice place to rent, ringing
the doorbell and saying, ‘I am a stranger here and I’m looking for
a place to rent. You don’t know, by any chance, of a place in the
neighborhood that’s for rent? Or, by any chance, is your own
place for rent?’ I got nowhere—many tries. Finally, I tried one
house. The lady said, ‘No, I don’t know any place for rent. No,
this is not for rent. But, now that you mention it, I think we’d be
willing to rent it.’ That’s where we lived—across from the Inter-
national House.’’
✜
Because of Wheeler’s engineering background—and, very likely,
his temperament—he was able from the beginning to function as
a kind of bridge between the physicists working with Fermi to
make the first self-sustaining, chain-reacting nuclear pile, and
the professional engineers who had been brought in as consul-
tants. For these reasons, Wheeler thinks, Arthur Compton, who
ran what was cryptically called the Metallurgical Laboratory at
the University of Chicago (in reality the reactor group) ap-
pointed him the liaison between the Chicago project and the Du
Pont Company, which had the responsibility of constructing the
first plutonium-production reactors.
On Thanksgiving Day 1942, the Fermi reactor in Chicago
went critical. I asked Wheeler if he had been a witness. ‘‘No,’’ he
told me, ‘‘I was in Wilmington with the Du Pont people. I really
wasn’t interested in a reactor demonstration. To me, it was obvi-
ous that it would work.’’ Wheeler had been going back and forth
twice a week on the train between Chicago and Wilmington for
several months, and finally, in February 1943, he decided to
move his family to Wilmington.
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