Albert Wattenberg, 90, Pioneered Nuclear Energy
Albert Wattenberg, 90, retired University of Illinois physics
professor and one of the scientists who worked with Enrico Fermi on the
first controlled release of nuclear energy, died June 27 at
Clark-Lindsey Village in Urbana.
Al was born in New York city, a few days after America entered World
War I. He attended public schools in Manhattan, before entering City
College of New York, where in the 1930s he first demonstrated his
lifelong commitment to peace, freedom and justice by organizing several
student strikes. He was president of his graduation class but refused to
attend graduation because the officiating officer was friendly with the
Italian Fascists.
In 1939 he began a graduate program in physics at Columbia
University. When Mr. Fermi left Columbia to work on what would be the
Manhattan project to build an atomic bomb, he recruited Al to accompany
him to the University of Chicago, where on Dec. 2, 1942, in a squash
court under the stands at Stagg Field, they inaugurated the era of
atomic power.
In commemoration, the physicists shared a bottle of Chianti and all
signed the bottle as a record of who was there. Al kept the bottle for
many years before donating it to the national archives.
Al’s recollection of the war years always conveyed the urgency
the physicists felt as they worked on this project because they feared
the Nazis would develop an atomic bomb first, yet he was ambivalent
about the course of the Manhattan project as directed by General Leslie
Groves.
When Mr. Fermi left to work on the bomb at Los Alamos National
Laboratories in New Mexico, Al stayed in Chicago, and worked with Leo
Szilard, who had theorized and patented the idea of a nuclear chain
reaction, and who had drafted the letter Albert Einstein sent to
President Roosevelt informing him of the possibility of atomic weapons.
In 1945, Al was one of the signers of the petition Szilard sent to
the government declaring that the unannounced use of nuclear weapons on
Japan at that stage of the war would be immoral.
After the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Al was one
of the founders in September 1945 of the peace-focused organization The
Federation of Atomic Scientists, which began publishing the Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists, with its famed doomsday clock on the cover.
After the war, Al was given a fellowship at Chicago to complete the
doctorate the war had interrupted. He finished in 1947 under the
direction of Mr. Fermi and continued doing experiments with Mr. Fermi at
the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago.
In 1949, Al and colleague H. Lichtenberger directed the design,
assembly and testing of the first enriched uranium heavy water reactor.
In 1949 to 1950 he was director of the Nuclear Physics Division at
Argonne. Argonne was focused on reactor design, and Al had become
interested in the emerging fields of elementary particle physics. In
addition, McCarthyism was beginning, and Al’s previous political
activities might have clouded his career at federal research facilities.
He left Argonne in 1950 and taught for a year at the University of
Illinois before taking a senior research physicist position at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He spent most of the rest of his working life chasing down mesons,
charmed quarks and other parts of the atom that promised to unleash the
mysteries of the universe. In 1958 he returned to the University of
Illinois, where he was a professor until his retirement in 1986. He was
the author of more than 90 articles in the journal Physics Review.
The Eisenhower administration Atoms for Peace program selected him
to be an adviser to Japan, and he was the first nuclear physicist to
visit that county in that capacity.
In his career at Illinois he performed numerous experiments on
subatomic particles at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in
Batavia, Ill., and at laboratories around the world.
He remained active in the physics world in retirement, and became
the editor of the History of Physics Newsletter. He had previously
co-edited the collected works of Mr. Fermi and done similar historical
work.
Al was often asked to share his knowledge of the dawn of the atomic
era. He wrote a number of articles on the topic, contributed to other
authors’ research, and was regularly interviewed by radio shows
such as Studs Terkel’s and NPR’s All Things Considered
whenever there was an anniversary of the first chain reaction or of the
dropping of the Hiroshima bomb.
Al remained a committed peace activist and supporter of progressive
causes. In the 1980s he served on the executive committee of the
Champaign-Urbana SANE/Nuclear Freeze organization. After becoming
emeritus he was a precinct committeeman for the Champaign County
Democratic Party.
He was an exceptionally inquisitive person, particularly into the
varieties of human culture, past and present, and natural environments
and environmental issues. He was an inveterate world traveler, and a
committed secular internationalist and humanist as well as a scientist.
An indefatigable fisherman, Al loved nothing more than the nearly
half century of summers he spent on the Vineyard with his family, his
extended family, and colleagues and friends, families, all of whom knew
him there as Uncle Al.
Al was a great teacher who for years took children on expeditions to
catch fish, net crabs, spear eels and dig clams, all in pursuit of the
perfect bouillabaisse. His grandchildren, all of whom imbibed the great
sense of curiosity and inquiring spirit that he worked to instill in
them, adored him.
He married Shirley Hier in 1943, and they led an active and loving
life as world travelers, parents, grandparents, and colleagues at the
University of Illinois, until her death in 1989. In 1992, Al married
Alice von Neuman. Al and Alice had a loving marriage that included many
trips to exotic locations around the world.
Survivors include his wife; his daughters, Beth Green of Longmeadow
and Aquinnah, Jill White of Chicago and Nina Tarr of Urbana, Ill.; his
brother, Lee Wattenberg of Minneapolis; nine grandchildren; and two
great-grandchildren.
Services were held at Clark-Lindsey Village on Sunday. Interment
will be on the Vineyard. A memorial service will be held at the
University of Illinois during the fall semester. Memorial contributions
can be made to The Trustees of Reservation at Martha’s Vineyard.