Physicist James Schoke invented instruments to detect uranium to prevent Manhattan Project workers from taking the dangerous element home with them.
Narrator: James Schoke, a physicist in the instrument group at Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, was charged with building specialized devices to detect radioactive elements--at first not so much for safety as to catch thieves.
James Schoke: I was told that they were pilfering uranium, which was called “T metal” at the time, from Site B, which was another site on campus where they were machining uranium and cladding it in aluminum for the X-10 reactor at Oak Ridge in order to produce plutonium. I learned all of this only because I was going to work on an instrument to detect uranium because people were walking out with it through the security gate. There was a good reason for that. Uranium was very heavy, very valuable--they were led to believe--by the way it was handled and treated. When it was machined it gave very large sparks, fiery sparks. And so it was a great souvenir, paperweight.
However, the people working on it did not know it was radioactive. So I was to make an instrument which would detect the chunks of uranium when they were walking out with them to prevent them from taking radioactivity home. And I did develop that and it was installed and it worked.