Interview with Donald Collins

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[Note: The interview was preceeded by playing of a tape from lecture by Ron Kathren on instrumentation at Jan. 1378 HPS meeting in San Diego. Slightly revised version in "Health Physics - A - Views of a military officer in Manhattan District - His instructions from General Groves - Don was only Army officer in the Manhattan District with an - Development of instrumentation Low current drains vacuum tubes (used for hearing aids) Low voltages - low currents that were being requested - Names associated with late 30's and early 4 0 ' s in instrument - He gets plans for Oak Ridge on a train - by mistake, of course Skepticism among instrument makers about need for the quantities - Howard Andrews his roommate on the Haven - His unwritten book

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had to get to a meeting Ends abruptly on question of his writing a chapter because he

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President, Don Collins Associates the flavor of what was done,the nature of the,as I understand it,competition mng the laboratories, etc. Some of ~ h cp e ople that were concerned at Chicago gave me the impress i cn that thevmde z ll the instruments that were of any use at all in the whole project. Some of the people at other places like Rochester said, 'Well, Chicago was very jealous about thc ir instruments, and that anybody else got ; whereas, we at Rc chester had Bill Bale, and tic went ahead and developed things tli at were just asus clu l. Thus it wasn ' t until well into the middle or even toward the end of the bl c tall ur g ical Lab days that they began to really es change information. IJhen I;. 2 . Morgan went down to Oak Ridge, hc* took his own ideas.Bill Neuman desc rj bed how Morgan arrived at the Bikini tests with all of his2equipment. and i t had t o be his stuff.Transportation arrangements had been made, bur, t o go along with his instruments to be sure that his stuff was the rc because Ev cry tli ing had t o be laid out just exactly, He was going he didn ' t trust anybody else's. Now, this is the kind of thing that I have been told. I'm sure it is exaggerated. Is all or part of this correct ? COLLIKS : Vcll,there was that el em cnt, and sometimes it was rather extensive. But som tim cs, you knov,we exaggerate some features in retrospect. of the reason for the people going their separate ways in thc early diy s vas the restriction due KO military security. And one of the first projects I had after1got into the Flanhattan Dist ric r ... I ),ad a discussion with Ce ncr zl Groves, write one of the instrumentation chapters, probably mnitoring a d environAt the tire of this interview, it was plannd that Ihn Collins would

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and he explained to mz- that this area of sec uri ry had to be maintained. yet,he wanted the important advances to be made available to the other projects. He was a rather unique person, and I was flattered that he had picked me t o do c his job. Disc ric t that had an electronics background. 1guess at the time,I was the only Army officer in the Manhattan C0LLIP:s : There were scientists working on the project in various places who were far more advanced than 1. But they were not in the Army as an officer at the time,and so it was easier forme to get through the security requirements. So, as itvas,it took them quite a while to clear my security for all these places.People didn ' t think that was a good idea to have one person know too STAXNARD: . Were there a lot of independent developments ? COLLINS : Yes, there were a lot of independent develop.ments. Of course, 2s soon as my clearance vast hra ugh,1first v cnt to Pianhartan District head - quarters on Eia nhat tan Island on 42nd.Street.I shuffled papers there until my clearance got through, which took 2bout two or three weeks to get the preliminary. Then I went to Chicago on temporary duty and reported to Captain Pct ers on,who then was the area engineer leader. He later became Colonel Peterson.He gave me some books to read saying, "I see you l re a physicist,and maybe you ' dlike to go through some of these books thatI have until we get your clearance. " I had a who lc stack of them. Then one day he called mein, and he said, "Well, what interested in this one that I really didn ' tdo much on the others.I ' ve been concentrating on the biological effects of x - rays 2nd radioactivity. " He said,

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cas, w11ilc they werc checking out m:. clearance and before1 had any official information,J began to speculate that the v3y t o end this war was viti, one the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima,I got a letter from him i n Germany saying what a prophet I turned out to be! If military security had I happened to mention that to a friend one evening ; and after known that,I ' dhave been i n more trouble than I was. Every Plonday morning, not Monday morning, PIsnday noon,I met with Peterson and with... the area engineer, and I met with him and r - ithDr. Compton, too. COLLINS : Arthur *Cornpton, yes. We got a review of the relationship between the physics that was involved and the military objectives.Iv as given the assignment of evaluating the instrumentation that was being developed and used at various Iocetions to select th ? bcs to vs il able to be used for military and civil d cfc nsc purposes. nlis was primarily porra ble instrumentation,but tliere were also sampling type operations. Oi course,at Chicago they thought they liad the ceiiti'r of everything, and ch cy did have a lot of people vor king on instruments there.I found other significant developments going 'on a t Berkeley and U s Alarnos, (oakFidge came a lit"de later because at that tim c the headquarters was still in Elan hart an, and they were constructing Oak Ridge) and at Hanford,at Rochester, and Columbia. I made the rounds to survey meters. I concentrated mostly on testing and set : ing up means of COmlmring

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vibrator flip flop circuit an< to shape the pulses in a portable Geiger counter. I Saw it being used in the scalars in the laboratory, 2nd I th0ugP.t i t vas kind ofa waste notto use it in portable instruments. The problem vas that, prior to that time,the very low current drain vacuum tubes were cot yet available. These were developed first by selecting hearing aid cubes,which were relatively new then.Jack Victor een was involved in that. And a fellow named Ealing was making these tubes,but.he had no concept of high vacuum techniques. He was just following a cookbook procedure as far as I could tell.Jack was trying to help him make them more nearly uniform. The development of thc electrometer tube was a very significant thing in portable instruments. A few years prior to that,the General Electric Company in Schenectady ' had come up with an electrometer tube. Type designation was FT54. This tube had a 6V filament and about lOOmA current drain on the filament. It operated at low voltages. When I first went to the klan hatta n District at the ? k t Lab in Chicago,I was amazed tobe among all thc se famous physicists and to find hoc little. .really in de3th electronics that they had.As I stayed there a little longer, I began to realize hoc little L knew about it. grid to hookup the signal to ; they were hooking it np to number tv o grid. Here, they didn ' teven knov which involved h radio,, it made sense then to use the second grid because g r i d The rc were radio amateurs that knew how in those days. , When I discovered that we weren ' t really dealing in the levels currents were very in port ant.Actually,.we were kind of i n between e lcc tro - static theory and ele c cri city be calls ewe had ex r rem ely low currents and res is cor s tii at never heard of Ohm's Law. W e nrcasured the resistance at one volta gc,

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e.g. 100 volts, and tried to use it at lover voltage(it ' s easier tc measure resistance at 100 volts a n 2 then use the items at a t e n t h of a vclc or cpmer of t o me vh enI first went in there, as I began to understand it,Is aw that people had reasons for some of the things,and they weren ' t as uninformed as I But they did not have the same resistance. What sea& v e q simple had first thought. What i t amounted t o was that,the early war effort took many physicists trained in electronics and electronics people into radar and other important war efforts. And so, when this work of ours came along,there was a demand for people with such backgrounds which gave me and many others opportunities that would not normally,have been available. Vc had resp on sibi l - i ties that were beyond our proven experience.So,it was a real challenge. SThXTrZARD: That was true of a great many people in the lian hatta n Engineer they ' d have to take someone less qualified. And on that basis,I thought, "OI:3y, 1'11 do the best I can. " I worked hard at it for many long hours and travelled a lot to tlre various places. Getting back to the electrometer,E ill Bale liad the FT54 and his in st run cnt, which was the most stable and the best portable,or transportable survey meter, of his ( I ' mnot sure),who developed a circuit which compensated for A - battery drift and theB - battery drift, so that th s calibrations remained constant for a reasonable time. But with the advent of the little tubes,the hearing aid tubes, we used a sinaller filament (curreqt). and I think Brown was a student

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let's see, I think i t cas low\, and a volt and a quarter, which is lou power. Jack Victoreen vas trying to work vith Ealing on these, finally gave up,anc started making the tubes himself. He came up with some very interesring and we had a contract, 2 Manhattan Disrrict letter concract,with Victoreen Insrrument Company to develop tubes and high meg resistors. STANNARD: About when was that? COLLINS : I think the development of these tubes from hearing aid tubes into an electrometer started in 1 9 4 3 . I went to Chicago in the fall of ' 4 3 , I took some of these tubcs down to Oak Ridge and to Rochester, and they were just beginning. They were of sufficient interest to various groups that a contract w a s let to develop them and produce them. So, I had me a stable electrometer tube that would work at very low currents. Incidentally, low currents gave us an extra benefit of longer life. Those tubes were almost as good as transistors in terms of long life. This opened the way for the development of a lot of new instruments. CO1,LIXS : Yes, they were mOSt1y for external radiation. The portable. instruments w e had that were in the development stage immediately prior to t h a t were largely Geiger counter instruments. We were developing lower power, less weight, and more stability. This node it possible for ionization chzsber instruments to become portable, i.e. area counters. And, of course,these l i t t l e tubes were used in the Geiger counter survey meters as well. The high meg resistors we had when I first joined the project were made by S . S. Vttite, a dental company, and they were lo9 Ohms, some of them 1 O 1 O O h m s . developed the method of putting graphite on glass and baking it. 2 rather cmplicatd, enpirical fonrrula titiat he us&.

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he was able to get up by several orders of mgnitucie, to IO1* t o Ohms, vhich increased the sensitivity of the ion chamber instruments proportionately. These were used as gamma survey meters for the first step,and then beta-gamma and then the alpha instruments came along shortly afterward. STANWARD : The alpha was called "Poppy?" Poppy".was a proportional counter with a loud speaker thatII popped off k-ith each pulse. COLLINS : Yes, that had a thin window. STAVKARD : Was thzt really the first portable alpha counter? COLLINS : I believe so. About thiit time, I wrote to Valt Disnep to get permission to use the Disney's names for code names in the instruments. Ve had Pluto, and Sneezy, and Doc, and so on. Well, Pluto was the alpha instrument that was developed as a result of these ncv tubes being available. It had an ionization chamber open at the bottom of the instrument for scannlng a surface. On the side of the icstrument we pasted a picture of the Walt Disney character Pluto with its nose right dohn a t the ion chamber where the sniffing vas. It vas kind of fun. One interesting thing here, this instrument was produced at Chicago,and then it was later produced by Hallicrafters (one production run) and at Victoreen. The Hallicrafters' instruments tried to use one of the high frequency acorn tubas. It was pretty good, but not as good as the electrometer. Anyway, some of these instruments found their way to Honsanto and Los Alamos and places that had alpha problems. T h e r c was a report written from Nonsanto that described a spill and szid that the instrument rea6 General Groves, thought, "Well, the General isn't going to knov w h a t a Pluto An zide who received this rep* before it w z s give? to

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classification of the report,and the Gsn era lh it the ceiling when h e saw that. He declared,eventhough somebody cried to explain to him how this ]1a13p,3-,4, that we should not use that name Pluto because it was too close to plutonium,and somebody else might make that r ran s it ion. So, the orders came through military channels to discontinue the use of the code name Pluto on this instrument.It came to Capt. Carl at Chicago, who was Peterson's assistant,andhe came tome with the orders,but he put a little extra in Isaid, " That doesn ' t seem right. " He shoved me the letter, and Isaid, Of course, thc people in the lab didn ' t go for this kind of arb it rar in css. There vasa little bit of animosity between the laboratory and …