The atomic bomb, first used 77 years ago this month, had two significant Evansville ties

It’s not hyperbole to suggest that there are two worlds – one before and one after the detonation of the atomic bomb.

Interestingly, there are two Southern Indiana connections to J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project.

Joseph Fabian Mattingly, the uncle of Evansville baseball legend Don, was present July 6, 1945 as the “gadget” was successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The U.S. dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9 and Japan surrendered from World War II shortly thereafter.

“It was very bright,” Joseph Fabian Mattingly told the Evansville Courier in 1995. “When it lit up the sky, the colors were beautiful – violet and purple. It was a pretty sight. We were on a mountainside about 17 miles out.

“It was bright as hell, and it was quiet. Eerie. There was no sound for a minute and a half. Then, whoom! A thunderous reverberation from the mountains occurred again and again. The light was like looking at the sun. There was a cloud layer about 17,000 feet and it looked like there was somebody at the end of the clouds shaking them like a bedsheet, vibrating up and down.”

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Then 86, that was Mattingly’s recollection of seeing the detonation in the New Mexico desert. Randy Mattingly said his uncle, who died at 91 in 2000, made for quite a conversation piece at family gatherings when he was growing up.

“Initially, I was young enough that it didn’t register to me,” Randy told the Courier & Press. “The A-bomb didn’t really register to me. He showed us the goggles (he wore during the detonation) at our grandfather’s house.”

Although those goggles (welder’s glasses) might bring in quite a price at an auction, Randy isn’t sure where they are.

Melba Newell Phillips, a female trailblazer from Hazleton in Gibson County, Indiana, worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer years before the A-bomb exploded.

Phillips, who died in 2004 at age 97, studied under and collaborated with Oppenheimer. She was part of a heroic age of physics, a time when scientists were just beginning to study quantum theory and other areas of physics that would bring the world into the atomic age, according to “American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It is the basis for an upcoming biographical film, “Oppenheimer,” scheduled to be released in July 2023.

Barely 16, Phillips graduated from Union High School in rural Pike County in 1923. She began her undergraduate work at Oakland City University and worked with Oppenheimer at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1930s. During the “Red Scare” of 1952, she stood up to congressional bullies of Senator Joseph McCarthy, but lost her job at Brooklyn College in the process, said Oakland City University social sciences professor and area historian Randy Mills.

Still, she persevered. In fact, the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1983 recognized her commitment to education by creating the Melba Newell Phillips Award, a national honor given yearly to the individual who is judged to have made an exceptional contribution to physics education.

Fateful phone call

In 1943, while working at the U.S. Weather Bureau in Evansville, Joseph Mattingly received a call from Dr. Philemon Edwards Church, who was assigned to the Manhattan Project to study/predict weather patterns and turbulence for the project, according to the July 2006 Mattingly Family Newsletter.

Church invited Mattingly, a 1927 Memorial High School graduate, to take part in his studies at the University of Chicago. He was given special leave where his position with the Weather Bureau was protected for the duration of the war. Mattingly also received, over objection from local military authorities, a special military deferment personally from Gen. Leslie Groves, Military Chief of the Manhattan Project.

After training in Chicago, he was sent to Hanford, Washington, assigned to Hanford Engineering Works, a division of E.I. DuPont. DuPont had erected the first full-size nuclear reactor at this site and would produce plutonium for the atomic bomb. Few of the 20,000 workers at Hanford, including Mattingly, knew what was going on or what the Hanford site mission entailed. One mile from the reactor, they built a tower several hundred feet tall that his team used to make continuous observations of barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, and cloud cover in an attempt to track the radioactive smoke from the production facility. Geiger counters were placed all over the area.

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Every morning Mattingly boarded a Piper Cub and was taken up to 2,000 feet to track smoke from the stacks. The Hanford Site was 600 square miles and the smoke was to diffuse before it got off the reservation. No one knew what was really going on other than a war project that involved something called the “gadget.”

The Hanford area ws later considered one of the most contaminated places in the world. Mattingly said at least one person died of cancer and it was in Hanford that his wife, Adeline, became ill with Parkinson's disease.

"But there's no way to know if radiation had anything to do with it," Mattingly told the Evansville Courier.

In July of 1945, Mattingly was sent to Alamogordo. “Uncle Fabian” was on hand to witness the most powerful development of the century. Following are a few of the quotes from his notebook made on the date of the detonation: “White hot 1 mile.” The second drawing shows a mushroom with the note, “Golden glowing one-half mile.” The third drawing shows a larger cloud and the note, “Violet brilliant color.” Other notes from his address book: “Base precaution C, burn from ultraviolet rays, (2) prone on face, (3) eye protection, (4) evacuation, in case of disaster. One half hour after blast, stratified layers aloft, no longer distinguishable from Albuquerque road. B-29 at 24,000 feet reported light bump at altitude above shot.”

When Mattingly returned to Hanford, he was the only one of the 20,000 workers who knew what the “gadget” was and what it could do. He didn’t know how it was going to be used until Aug. 6, 1945, when the story broke that the bomb “Little Boy” was dropped over the city of Hiroshima and three days later the bomb “Fat Man” was dropped over the city of Nagasaki.

Unlike the Trinity Site in New Mexico, the Hanford reactor site is one of the most polluted sites in the world. In their rush they just didn’t know what the consequences were to the environment. The government is spending $1 billion per year on cleanup that will go for several more years.

In 1947, Mattingly returned to the University of Washington in a sub-faculty position in the newly formed Department of Meteorology and Climatology. He returned to the U.S. Weather Bureau in Evansville in 1949. He built his house in the summer of 1950 on St. George Road and lived there the rest of his life next door to his sister Catherine Hess.

Phillips led dissent

After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan, Phillips joined other scientists organized to prevent future nuclear wars. She took a great hit to her career during the Cold War for standing up to McCarthyism. Colleagues and students noted her “intellectual honesty, self-criticism, and style,” and called her “a role model for principle and perseverance" in "Melba Phillips: Leader in Science and Conscience."

As she moved up the academic ranks, Phillips pursued graduate research under Oppenheimer and earned her doctorate in 1933. Within a few years she was known throughout the physics world because of her contribution to the field via the Oppenheimer-Phillips effect, according to "Women in Physics."

The 1935 Oppenheimer-Phillips Effect explained “what was at the time unexpected behavior of accelerated deuterons (nuclei of deuterium, or ‘heavy hydrogen’ atoms) in reactions with other nuclei,” according to a University of Chicago press release. When Oppenheimer died in 1967, his New York Times obituary noted his and Phillips’ discovery as a “basic contribution to quantum theory.”

Phillips was subsequently fired from her university positions due to a law which required the termination of any New York City employee who invoked the Fifth Amendment.

Bonner explained, “McCarran was a specialist at putting people in the position in which they had to invoke the Fifth Amendment. It was a deliberate expression of the McCarthyism of the time.”

In a 1977 interview, Phillips briefly discussed the incident (although she was reluctant because she was trying to keep the interviewer focused on her scientific accomplishments). She stated: “I was fired from Brooklyn College for failure to cooperate with the McCarran Committee, and I think that ought to go into the record . . . city colleges were particularly vulnerable, and the administration was particularly McCarthyite.”

Phillips stated that she wasn’t particularly political. Her objection to cooperating had been a matter of principle.

In 1987, Brooklyn College publicly apologized for firing Phillips, and in 1997 created the aforementioned scholarship in her name. Phillips died on Nov. 8, 2004 in Petersburg, Indiana.

The New York Times referred to Phillips in her obituary as “a pioneer in science education” and noted that “at a time when there were few women working as scientists, Dr. Phillips was leader among her peers.”

Her accomplishments helped pave the way for other women in the sciences.

In a 1977 interview, Phillips addressed the problems women face in aspiring to science careers an a 1977 interview, stating: "We’re not going to solve them, but, as I’ve been saying all the time; if we make enough effort, we’ll make progress; and I think progress has been made. We sometimes slip back, but we never quite slip all the way back; or we never slip back to the same place. There’s a great deal of truth in saying that progress is not steady no matter how inevitable."

Contact Gordon Engelhardt by email at gordon.engelhardt@courierpress.com or on Twitter @EngGordon.

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Evansville's ties to the first detonation of the A-bomb in 1945