James A. Schoke was selected to be part of the Special Engineering Detachment that worked at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago on the Manhattan Project. He worked in the Instrument Section, developing nuclear radiation detection and measurement instruments. He went on to a successful entrepreneurial career in the fields of Nucleonics, Instrumentation and Fluorescent & UV Lamps, and was featured in a 1949 Popular Mechanics article, “The Million-Dollar Baby of the Nuclear Age."