
Kodak's Discovery of A-Bomb Testing (2016) - howard941
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a21382/how-kodak-accidentally-discovered-radioactive-fallout/
======
ransford
Feynman mentions the physicist Julian Webb in "Surely You're Joking, Mr.
Feynman" [1]. The staff at Oak Ridge were generally kept in the dark about
their role in the Manhattan Project, including the fact that the stuff they
were producing (purified uranium isotopes) was extremely dangerous if handled
improperly. Oppenheimer tasked Feynman with ensuring the integrity of the
supply chain and sent Feynman to Oak Ridge for a frank safety discussion with
the "big shots," and apparently Oppenheimer knew Webb to be technically
capable enough to trust with the technical implications.

Feynman doesn't say what, if anything, he told Webb, but it's an interesting
backstory -- it's possible Webb knew more than this article suggests.

[1]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=_gA_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=_gA_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&lpg=PT125&dq=julian+webb+feynman&source=bl&ots=HCzYi-
YNOM&sig=ACfU3U3b4Tr6QRmrPHFirEcuhTlwxDePUA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7vvmQ7sXgAhXlN30KHW3EDT0Q6AEwAXoECAAQAQ)

~~~
AceJohnny2
Offtopic, but a couple pages later is the most memorable passage of the whole
book to me, a software engineer:

(about setting up the IBM machines to perform calculations for the Manhattan
Project)

"Well, Mr Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer
disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very
serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with
computers is you _play_ with them. They are so wonderful. [...] After a while
the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't
supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly-- while he was
sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print
arctangent X [...] Absolutely useless! We _had_ tables of arc-tangents. But
you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease-- the _delight_
in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first
time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. I was asked to stop working on
the stuff I was doing in my group and go down and take over the IBM group, and
I tried to avoid the disease."

I try to keep this in mind when I'm working. I must admit I'm not very good at
avoiding that disease.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
Do you know the calculator hacking community? Graphing calculators like TI-84
are commonly used in American math classes, and they are reasonably powerful
general purpose computers. So the hacking community started because a bunch of
highschoolers are bored enough studying math at school, and discovered
programming. First it was BASIC, then Z80 assembly, and later some even
started creating their own programming environment on the calculator,
rediscovered many high-performance graphics hacks used by early video games.
After graduating from highschools, those who still have interests in
calculators have developed open source toolchains, programming languages and
operating systems in college for calculator development.

However, when Texas Instruments released TI-Nspire CX, it was boycotted by the
vast majority members from the hacking community because the system is locked
down.

Some teachers and parents commented,

> _" one thing that [...] is NOT wrong is TI's refusal to make the NSpire a
> platform for Doom or Quake or any other distraction that kids enjoy. These
> things may be fun, but they aren't about learning math"_

I think it describes the same phenomenon.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And then people are surprised kids hate school and don't learn a thing.

Tinkering, fun, and being free to follow a stupid idea down a rabbit hole is
how people learn and internalize stuff.

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archgoon
This throws some light as to why Kodak had weapons grade uranium in one of
their labs.

[https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/15/us/new-york-kodak-
uranium/ind...](https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/15/us/new-york-kodak-
uranium/index.html)

At the time, to me (not having had this bit of context), it seemed like
overkill, but it sounds like they've had a actually been involved for a long
time, with associated business concerns, with dealing with the impacts of
nuclear processes.

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jellicle
The US government undertook real and widespread environmental monitoring of
radioactivity from at least 1947, and perhaps earlier. Many samples were taken
of air, water, soil, vegetation, human bone and other materials to understand
the extent of radioactive fallout.

There were international incidents around test fallout in the early 1950s. It
was a major political issue in the early 1950s. Presidential candidates RAN on
this issue. Consciousness of the problems of test fallout resulted in an
above-ground test ban treaty. The US's last above-ground test happened in
1962.

So this was a problem that started in 1945, was well known to the general
public within a few years, and was solved by 1962. This is obviously not
perfect. But it certainly isn't the case that it was ignored until 1997 and
people were only finding out about it then.

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ChuckMcM
In Las Vegas when there wasn't anything interesting for nerdy high school kids
to do, you could always drive up the Great Basin highway with your school's
Geiger counter and check out the radioactive plants north of Coyote Springs
:-)

There used to be a BLM[1] camp ground up there where you could ride your dirt
bikes on the trails.

Reading this makes me wonder if it still has hot spots.

[1] Bureau of Land Management - kind of like a national forest but where they
care less about the land under their control.

~~~
AceJohnny2
> _[1] Bureau of Land Management - kind of like a national forest but where
> they care less about the land under their control._

CGP Grey made a video on the topic recently:

[https://youtu.be/LruaD7XhQ50](https://youtu.be/LruaD7XhQ50)

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jhbadger
"Even today, X-ray film is highly sensitive [to radiation] (much more so than
regular photographic film)"

In fact, that's actually been used as a feature in molecular biology.
Traditionally many visualizations in biology were done by labeling molecules
of interest with radioisotopes and having these form images on x-ray film.
This is still done in some cases, but is being mostly replaced with
fluorescent labeling.

~~~
danaliv
I had radiation therapy a while ago and they were able to take X-rays just by
holding a piece of film behind my back. Freaky!

~~~
ars
Was there some kind of shutter? Because otherwise wouldn't it be very blurry?

~~~
danaliv
This was done during treatment so the "shutter" was the LINAC itself.

~~~
iguy
Do you know why? Were they just confirming that you hadn't wriggled & they got
the right spot?

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nyolfen
relatedly, nytimes posted this interview yesterday with american soldiers who
were exposed to a nuclear blast in the 50s, some of whom experienced health
issues later in life. their description of what it was like (from close enough
to be knocked over while sitting down and facing away by the blast wave) is
awesome, in the old, bad sense:

[https://youtu.be/FokopVKMgdU](https://youtu.be/FokopVKMgdU)

------
nabla9
Soviet scientist Georgii Flerov figured out nuclear weapons program was about
to start indirectly from the fact that nothing was being published on nuclear
fission and physicists in the field didn't publish at all. That was during
MAUD era before Manhattan project was started.

Flerov informed Stalin April 1942, serval months before Cambridge Five leaked
the MAUD papers to Staling.

~~~
HONEST_ANNIE
Modern day scifi version:

OpenAI stops publishing their models. There are rumors that Geoffrey Hinton
wrote a letter to the president. Deep Mind,Google Brain, FAIR go all silent.
AI researchers stop updating their twitter and don't respond to email. Zero
publications to NeurIPS 2020 from the best groups. Then someone spots few of
those guys buying coffee near NSA's Utah Data Center. That center seems to
grow and grow.

In the China Baidu Research goes silent as well.

Strange lights are seen on the desert sky....

------
User23
It's worth remembering that Kodak was one of the premier high technology
companies of its day. George Eastman endowed MIT and other technical schools,
because his fortune was built on the work of scientists and engineers. Even
well into the 80s and even early 90s they had top notch scientists, engineers,
and inventors working for them. The late era management is a different story
entirely and serves as a cautionary tale.

------
mistrial9
related reading .. The Firecracker Boys, by Alaskan author Dan O'Neil ..
recommended
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_O%27Neill_(writer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_O%27Neill_\(writer\))

------
aliswe
"What he uncovered was shocking." ... Ugh

~~~
qubex
There must be a wizard in some word processor I haven't yet come across for
making “clickbait articles”. It must feature a template with “shocked at what
he found out” and “reached out to” as mandatory fill-ins.

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ganzuul
Would be interesting to correlate Kodak's... business opportunities, following
the briefing. How profitable was their silence?

~~~
qubex
That’s not (really) how time-series work...

~~~
ganzuul
I'm sure there are other tools than time-series available to us...?

Perhaps if we look at some of the potential questions we would like to answer
we can find more suitable data science methods?

    
    
      Did Kodak have competitors in the X-ray film business? What happened to them?
      Did this packing material plant supply products to other companies than just Kodak? 
      Did the company culture start to resemble that of another company after the briefing? (Hard but interesting.)
      Did their hiring practices change?
      Did they get cheap loans?
      Did they buy other companies?
      Was their HQ moved or renovated?
      Was someone pressured to leave due to political leanings?
    

etc.

~~~
qubex
Yeah because all of those can't be due to a booming postwar economy.

Cheap loans, you say? So to keep Kodak quiet, the US government put pressure
on some banks to give cheap money to Kodak so that to keep a few folks in one
company quiet they'd have to deal with keeping a load of analysts, bank
managers, and supervisors quiet in a plethora of banks?

Pressured to leave for political leanings? You mean in an an organisation with
a considerable number of possibly left-leaning academics on the eve of
McCarthyism?

Did they buy other companies? Gosh, I'm sure Kodak wasn't into the whole M&A
thing.

 _Et cetera_ , do you see my point?

~~~
ganzuul
Is your point that no investigation should be made because coincidences exist?
If so, no.

