The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise KiernanMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a fascinating insight into how largely unscientific women from average walks of life took a chance on description-less remote military work to largely staff the in Oak Ridge, TN - then the largest building in the world. At one point they, the women, engage in a productivity contest with the largely male PhD's in using the calutrons: mass spectrometers used for separating the isotopes of uranium. The ladies won. Apparently, the stuck to the recipe while the nerds tweaked which is a manufacturing productivity lesson.
The lives, successes, and obstacles to surmount for the women is the main story here. Of course, other aspects to live in the isolated, secure facility enter in, such as a few paragraphs on < a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebb_Cade">Ebb Cade, one of several unwilling participants in the first human injection experiments with plutonium. This comes across as part of the racism inherent in work assignments and home sites. (TN was more segregated than the Federal Government and the Feds accommodated local prejudices. Enoch P. Waters wrote in 1945, "It was first community I have ever seen with slums that were deliberately planned, as backwards sociologically as the atomic bomb is advanced scientifically.")
To get back to the women: two deserve special note for original science that led to the explaining and understanding fission: Lise Meitner and Ida Noddack.
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