Dent 2023
Author: Julian Gómez Issue: 2023-10-18
Dent 2023
by Julian Gómez
*Continued from Ellen Bradbury Reid's tour in Plex: 4 October 2023*, “... and what was the area called Bathtub Row?”
General Groves’ mechanism for dealing with stress
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
Whenever he got stressed, “he would pop a Whitman’s chocolate into his mouth.”
A comment about the Oppenheimer’s house
“It was a surprise when the Oppenheimers got a kitchen, because everyone knew Kitty didn’t cook.”
And that the roads between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, and around the lab, were terrible. She said many of the wives expressed a sentiment that they would not venture on the road to Santa Fe again until the war was over.
I agree. To this day the old road between Santa Fe and Los Alamos is absolutely terrible.
But now there’s a freeway.
And this was directly related to how the road to test site TA-10 got paved
An atomic bomb needs a conventional explosive to slam the sub-critical masses together, so there was quite a bit of experimentation going on at Los Alamos to find the best way to do that. In TA-10 they experimented with lots and lots of high explosive, trying to find the right way to trigger the nuclear reaction.
LANL is high up in the mountains, and there are a number of flat ridges extending outward from the central site:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/YydAskBNGDW8qRxU7
(apologies for the advertising, I don’t know how to get Google to not do that)
TA-10 was on one of those ridges, pretty far away from the central site. After all, nobody would've liked high explosives continually going off near the dining hall. The state of the road from the lab to TA-10 was comparable to the state of the road from Santa Fe–terrible. In fact, the road to TA-10 was worse because it wasn't even paved. Imagine being the driver of the truck that was daily carrying all that high explosive out to the test site over a route that dated back to probably the Stone Age.
According to Ellen, somebody finally figured out how to fix that situation. They took the springs off a jeep and convinced General Groves to do an inspection of TA-10 using that jeep. Shortly after that experience, the road got paved.
And what was the area called Bathtub Row?
As the Manhattan Project got going, housing was built at a furious pace. It was impossible to build homes for every single family. There were a few, but then the attractiveness of each abode would be related to how many points a person had. The top management, for example, had enough points to get a house to themselves, one step down would get one side of a duplex, etc. Down at the bottom would be what were essentially bunkhouses.
The street is still called Bathtub Row. It was called that, because–those were the top-ranked houses. They had bathtubs. Everywhere else just had showers.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/m3VnJ92ZZPr1DXGt6
Photos
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[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
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