Nuclear Museum Logo
Nuclear Museum Logo

National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Samuel King Allison was an American physicist.

Allison was born in Chicago, in 1900. He studied at the University of Chicago, receiving a Ph.D. in 1923.

With the outbreak of World War II, Allison served as a consultant to the National Defense Research Council in 1940. He was also a member of the Chicago Met Lab, and was among the team of scientists who achieved the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, Chicago Pile-1, in 1942. Allison would go on to be named director of the Met Lab. Fellow scientist Alvin Weinberg recalled:

“The laboratory had its giants—Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton, and Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner; it had its pessimists and bureaucrats; and it had a lot of somewhat bewildered young people undertaking their first scientific jobs. It was Sam Allison who, with his extraordinary patience and insight, kept this disparate crew focused on the main job, which was to achieve success ahead of the Nazi competitors.”

In 1944, Allison went to Los Alamos to become chairman of the Los Alamos Technical and Scheduling Committee. It was Allison who would count down the final seconds before the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945. He later joked about his fame, “I think I’m the first person to count backward.”

After the war, Allison was awarded the Medal of Merit in 1946 by General Leslie Groves for his work on the Manhattan Project. He returned to the University of Chicago to become the first director of the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies. He also worked with the National Academy of Sciences and was chairman of the NAS Committee on Nuclear Science.

Allison died on September 15, 1965 in Culham, England.

Samuel K. Allison's Timeline
1900 Nov 13th Born in Chicago, Illinois.
1923 Received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
19231925 National Research Fellow at Harvard.
19251926 Fellowship at Carnegie Institution.
19261930 Faculty at University of California, Berkeley.
1940 Consultant to the National Defense Research Council.
1941 Member of the Uranium Committee.
1943 Jun Became director of the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory.
19441945 Worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.
1945 Jul 16th Counted down the last seconds before the Trinity test explosion.
19461965 Director of the Enrico Fermi Institute of Nuclear Studies (1946-57, 1963-65).
1965 Sep 15th Died in England attending the Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research Conference.

Samuel King Allison's Los Alamos ID Photo

Related Profiles

Ray E. McMurray

Los Alamos, NM

Emmett A. Alexander

Los Alamos, NM

Woodson H. Clay

Y-12 Plant

Woodson Clay worked for the Tennessee Eastman Corporation at the Y-12 Plant.

Jas M. Strong

Oak Ridge, TN

Jas Strong worked for the Roane-Anderson Company.