Veteran Robert Cantrell recalls stopping for breakfast one day on his way to Ryerson –carrying what turned out to be an enormously valuable piece of platinum.
Narrator: The Manhattan Project involved handling rare and valuable materials, as Robert Cantrell found out one day.
Robert Cantrell: One day one of the chemists brought me over a piece of platinum about ten inches square, and he wanted to have a little container made out of the platinum. So I wrote out a pass and said, “I am taking this platinum over there to have something done with it.”
On the way over I stopped and I had a cup of coffee and a piece of pie because I did not have any breakfast that morning. And the total elapsed time from when it was stamped out in one place and stamped in at another place was twenty-two minutes or so.
Well, about two days later, my boss called me in and said, “Hey, Bob, did you take a piece of platinum from New Chem over to Ryerson Hall?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “Do you know how much that platinum is worth?”
I said, “I do not know what it is worth.”
He said, “Worth about seventy thousand dollars. You had about half of all the available platinum in the country.”