Oliphant's Visit To The United States
When there was no reaction from America to the reports of the MAUD Committee, Mark Oliphant crossed the Atlantic in an unheated bomber in August 1941. He found that Lyman Briggs had not circulated the reports to the Uranium Committee, but had kept them in a safe. Oliphant then contacted Ernest Lawrence, James Conant, Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton and managed to increase the urgency of the American research programmes. The MAUD Reports finally made a big impression. Overnight the Americans changed their minds about the feasibility of an atomic bomb and suggested a cooperative effort with Britain. Harold C. Urey and George Braxton Pegram were sent to the UK in November 1941, to confer but Britain did not take up the offer of collaboration. The offer lapsed without any action being taken.
Read more about this topic: Tube Alloys
Famous quotes containing the words united states, oliphant, visit, united and/or states:
“In the United States there is more space where nobody is is than where anybody is.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born.... These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution—this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.”
—Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897)
“If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited him, and waste his time and deface your own act? Visit him now.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)