12 ms·

Kodak's Discovery of A-Bomb Testing (2016)

186 points by howard941 8y ago

jhbadger 8y ago
"Even today, X-ray film is highly sensitive [to radiation] (much more so than regular photographic film)" In fact, that's actually been used as a feature in molecular biology. Traditionally many visualizations in biology were done by labeling molecules of interest with radioisotopes and having these form images on x-ray film. This is still done in some cases, but is being mostly replaced with fluorescent labeling.
- danaliv 8y ago
  I had radiation therapy a while ago and they were able to take X-rays just by holding a piece of film behind my back. Freaky!
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    That was done? That ray is vastly more powerful than diagnostic doses and is generally targeting at a small area. Diagnostic doses had their strength magnified by using fluorescent plates which produce multiple visible light photons from a single X-ray photon, which in turn exposes the film. ‘Had’ because it’s usually a digital process now.
  - ars 8y ago
    Was there some kind of shutter? Because otherwise wouldn't it be very blurry?
    - danaliv 8y ago
      This was done during treatment so the "shutter" was the LINAC itself.
      - iguy 8y ago
        Do you know why? Were they just confirming that you hadn't wriggled & they got the right spot?
    - gpderetta 8y ago
      A collimator [1] was probably in front of the film. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimator
ChuckMcM 8y ago
In Las Vegas when there wasn't anything interesting for nerdy high school kids to do, you could always drive up the Great Basin highway with your school's Geiger counter and check out the radioactive plants north of Coyote Springs :-) There used to be a BLM[1] camp ground up there where you could ride your dirt bikes on the trails. Reading this makes me wonder if it still has hot spots. [1] Bureau of Land Management - kind of like a national forest but where they care less about the land under their control.
- AceJohnny2 8y ago
  > [1] Bureau of Land Management - kind of like a national forest but where they care less about the land under their control. CGP Grey made a video on the topic recently: https://youtu.be/LruaD7XhQ50 https://youtu.be/LruaD7XhQ50
- gonzo 8y ago
  Heh... speaking from experience, there was a lot for nerdy high school kids to do in Las Vegas. Clark HS 1980.
ransford 8y ago
Feynman mentions the physicist Julian Webb in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" [1]. The staff at Oak Ridge were generally kept in the dark about their role in the Manhattan Project, including the fact that the stuff they were producing (purified uranium isotopes) was extremely dangerous if handled improperly. Oppenheimer tasked Feynman with ensuring the integrity of the supply chain and sent Feynman to Oak Ridge for a frank safety discussion with the "big shots," and apparently Oppenheimer knew Webb to be technically capable enough to trust with the technical implications. Feynman doesn't say what, if anything, he told Webb, but it's an interesting backstory -- it's possible Webb knew more than this article suggests. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=_gA_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&lpg=PT125&dq=julian+webb+feynman&source=bl&ots=HCzYi-YNOM&sig=ACfU3U3b4Tr6QRmrPHFirEcuhTlwxDePUA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7vvmQ7sXgAhXlN30KHW3EDT0Q6AEwAXoECAAQAQ https://books.google.com/books?id=_gA_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&lpg=...
- AceJohnny2 8y ago
  Offtopic, but a couple pages later is the most memorable passage of the whole book to me, a software engineer: (about setting up the IBM machines to perform calculations for the Manhattan Project) "Well, Mr Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. [...] After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly-- while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arctangent X [...] Absolutely useless! We had tables of arc-tangents. But you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease-- the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease." I try to keep this in mind when I'm working. I must admit I'm not very good at avoiding that disease.
  - pytyper2 8y ago
    I'm 90% disease, 10% real work. Edit: But the 10% real work, I work real real hard :)
ganzuul 8y ago
Would be interesting to correlate Kodak's... business opportunities, following the briefing. How profitable was their silence?
- qubex 8y ago
  That’s not (really) how time-series work...
  - ganzuul 8y ago
    I'm sure there are other tools than time-series available to us...? Perhaps if we look at some of the potential questions we would like to answer we can find more suitable data science methods? Did Kodak have competitors in the X-ray film business? What happened to them? Did this packing material plant supply products to other companies than just Kodak? Did the company culture start to resemble that of another company after the briefing? (Hard but interesting.) Did their hiring practices change? Did they get cheap loans? Did they buy other companies? Was their HQ moved or renovated? Was someone pressured to leave due to political leanings? etc.
    - qubex 8y ago
      Yeah because all of those can't be due to a booming postwar economy. Cheap loans, you say? So to keep Kodak quiet, the US government put pressure on some banks to give cheap money to Kodak so that to keep a few folks in one company quiet they'd have to deal with keeping a load of analysts, bank managers, and supervisors quiet in a plethora of banks? Pressured to leave for political leanings? You mean in an an organisation with a considerable number of possibly left-leaning academics on the eve of McCarthyism? Did they buy other companies? Gosh, I'm sure Kodak wasn't into the whole M&A thing. Et cetera, do you see my point?
      - ganzuul 8y ago
        Is your point that no investigation should be made because coincidences exist? If so, no.
nabla9 8y ago
Soviet scientist Georgii Flerov figured out nuclear weapons program was about to start indirectly from the fact that nothing was being published on nuclear fission and physicists in the field didn't publish at all. That was during MAUD era before Manhattan project was started. Flerov informed Stalin April 1942, serval months before Cambridge Five leaked the MAUD papers to Staling.
- weinzierl 8y ago
  Asimov used this idea in his excellent short story "Spell My Name with an S" from 1958. Dr. Kristow said stolidly, "Executed!" "He might have been. Ordinarily, I would even assume so, though the Russians are not more foolish than we are and don't kill any nuclear physicist they can avoid killing. The thing is there's another reason why a nuclear physicist, of all people, might suddenly disappear. I don't have to tell you." "Crash research; top secret. I take it that's what you mean. Do you believe that's it?" [...] "Has it been decided that we're to go on shield research, too?" "Yes." Kristow's hand went back over his short, bristly hair, making a dry, whispery sound. "We're going to give it everything we've got. Knowing the papers written by the men who disappeared, we can get right on their heels. We may even beat them to it. —Of course, they'll find out we're working on it." "Let them," said Brand. "Let them. It will keep them from attacking. I don't see any percentage in selling ten of our cities just to get ten of theirs— if we're both protected and they're too dumb to know that." "But not too soon. We don't want them finding out too soon.
- HONEST_ANNIE 8y ago
  Modern day scifi version: OpenAI stops publishing their models. There are rumors that Geoffrey Hinton wrote a letter to the president. Deep Mind,Google Brain, FAIR go all silent. AI researchers stop updating their twitter and don't respond to email. Zero publications to NeurIPS 2020 from the best groups. Then someone spots few of those guys buying coffee near NSA's Utah Data Center. That center seems to grow and grow. In the China Baidu Research goes silent as well. Strange lights are seen on the desert sky....
aliswe 8y ago
"What he uncovered was shocking." ... Ugh
- qubex 8y ago
  There must be a wizard in some word processor I haven't yet come across for making “clickbait articles”. It must feature a template with “shocked at what he found out” and “reached out to” as mandatory fill-ins.
jellicle 8y ago
The US government undertook real and widespread environmental monitoring of radioactivity from at least 1947, and perhaps earlier. Many samples were taken of air, water, soil, vegetation, human bone and other materials to understand the extent of radioactive fallout. There were international incidents around test fallout in the early 1950s. It was a major political issue in the early 1950s. Presidential candidates RAN on this issue. Consciousness of the problems of test fallout resulted in an above-ground test ban treaty. The US's last above-ground test happened in 1962. So this was a problem that started in 1945, was well known to the general public within a few years, and was solved by 1962. This is obviously not perfect. But it certainly isn't the case that it was ignored until 1997 and people were only finding out about it then.
trhway 8y ago
>Finally the company and the government came to an agreement. The AEC would provide Webb, by now the head of Kodak's physics division, with schedules and maps of future tests so that Kodak could take the necessary precautions to protect its product. In return, the people of Kodak were to keep everything they knew about the government's Nevada nuclear testing a secret. it is good to be a Big Business! The hush-hush behind the closed doors between the government and the Big Business reminds another similar case of dealing with a national scale "radioactive fallout" - mortgage bonds/CDS of 2008.
nyolfen 8y ago
relatedly, nytimes posted this interview yesterday with american soldiers who were exposed to a nuclear blast in the 50s, some of whom experienced health issues later in life. their description of what it was like (from close enough to be knocked over while sitting down and facing away by the blast wave) is awesome, in the old, bad sense: https://youtu.be/FokopVKMgdU https://youtu.be/FokopVKMgdU
mistrial9 8y ago
related reading .. The Firecracker Boys, by Alaskan author Dan O'Neil .. recommended https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_O%27Neill_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_O%27Neill_(writer)
archgoon 8y ago
This throws some light as to why Kodak had weapons grade uranium in one of their labs. https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/15/us/new-york-kodak-uranium/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/15/us/new-york-kodak-uranium/ind... At the time, to me (not having had this bit of context), it seemed like overkill, but it sounds like they've had a actually been involved for a long time, with associated business concerns, with dealing with the impacts of nuclear processes.
User23 8y ago
It's worth remembering that Kodak was one of the premier high technology companies of its day. George Eastman endowed MIT and other technical schools, because his fortune was built on the work of scientists and engineers. Even well into the 80s and even early 90s they had top notch scientists, engineers, and inventors working for them. The late era management is a different story entirely and serves as a cautionary tale.

186 points by howard941 8y ago

"Even today, X-ray film is highly sensitive [to radiation] (much more so than regular photographic film)" In fact, that's actually been used as a feature in molecular biology. Traditionally many visualizations in biology were done by labeling molecules of interest with radioisotopes and having these form images on x-ray film. This is still done in some cases, but is being mostly replaced with fluorescent labeling.

danaliv 8y ago
I had radiation therapy a while ago and they were able to take X-rays just by holding a piece of film behind my back. Freaky!
- lostlogin 8y ago
  That was done? That ray is vastly more powerful than diagnostic doses and is generally targeting at a small area. Diagnostic doses had their strength magnified by using fluorescent plates which produce multiple visible light photons from a single X-ray photon, which in turn exposes the film. ‘Had’ because it’s usually a digital process now.
- ars 8y ago
  Was there some kind of shutter? Because otherwise wouldn't it be very blurry?
  - danaliv 8y ago
    This was done during treatment so the "shutter" was the LINAC itself.
    - iguy 8y ago
      Do you know why? Were they just confirming that you hadn't wriggled & they got the right spot?
  - gpderetta 8y ago
    A collimator [1] was probably in front of the film. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimator

ChuckMcM 8y ago

In Las Vegas when there wasn't anything interesting for nerdy high school kids to do, you could always drive up the Great Basin highway with your school's Geiger counter and check out the radioactive plants north of Coyote Springs :-) There used to be a BLM[1] camp ground up there where you could ride your dirt bikes on the trails. Reading this makes me wonder if it still has hot spots. [1] Bureau of Land Management - kind of like a national forest but where they care less about the land under their control.

AceJohnny2 8y ago
> [1] Bureau of Land Management - kind of like a national forest but where they care less about the land under their control. CGP Grey made a video on the topic recently: https://youtu.be/LruaD7XhQ50 https://youtu.be/LruaD7XhQ50
gonzo 8y ago
Heh... speaking from experience, there was a lot for nerdy high school kids to do in Las Vegas. Clark HS 1980.

ransford 8y ago

Feynman mentions the physicist Julian Webb in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" [1]. The staff at Oak Ridge were generally kept in the dark about their role in the Manhattan Project, including the fact that the stuff they were producing (purified uranium isotopes) was extremely dangerous if handled improperly. Oppenheimer tasked Feynman with ensuring the integrity of the supply chain and sent Feynman to Oak Ridge for a frank safety discussion with the "big shots," and apparently Oppenheimer knew Webb to be technically capable enough to trust with the technical implications. Feynman doesn't say what, if anything, he told Webb, but it's an interesting backstory -- it's possible Webb knew more than this article suggests. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=_gA_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&lpg=PT125&dq=julian+webb+feynman&source=bl&ots=HCzYi-YNOM&sig=ACfU3U3b4Tr6QRmrPHFirEcuhTlwxDePUA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7vvmQ7sXgAhXlN30KHW3EDT0Q6AEwAXoECAAQAQ https://books.google.com/books?id=_gA_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&lpg=...

AceJohnny2 8y ago
Offtopic, but a couple pages later is the most memorable passage of the whole book to me, a software engineer: (about setting up the IBM machines to perform calculations for the Manhattan Project) "Well, Mr Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. [...] After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly-- while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arctangent X [...] Absolutely useless! We had tables of arc-tangents. But you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease-- the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease." I try to keep this in mind when I'm working. I must admit I'm not very good at avoiding that disease.
- pytyper2 8y ago
  I'm 90% disease, 10% real work. Edit: But the 10% real work, I work real real hard :)

ganzuul 8y ago

Would be interesting to correlate Kodak's... business opportunities, following the briefing. How profitable was their silence?

qubex 8y ago
That’s not (really) how time-series work...
- ganzuul 8y ago
  I'm sure there are other tools than time-series available to us...? Perhaps if we look at some of the potential questions we would like to answer we can find more suitable data science methods? Did Kodak have competitors in the X-ray film business? What happened to them? Did this packing material plant supply products to other companies than just Kodak? Did the company culture start to resemble that of another company after the briefing? (Hard but interesting.) Did their hiring practices change? Did they get cheap loans? Did they buy other companies? Was their HQ moved or renovated? Was someone pressured to leave due to political leanings? etc.
  - qubex 8y ago
    Yeah because all of those can't be due to a booming postwar economy. Cheap loans, you say? So to keep Kodak quiet, the US government put pressure on some banks to give cheap money to Kodak so that to keep a few folks in one company quiet they'd have to deal with keeping a load of analysts, bank managers, and supervisors quiet in a plethora of banks? Pressured to leave for political leanings? You mean in an an organisation with a considerable number of possibly left-leaning academics on the eve of McCarthyism? Did they buy other companies? Gosh, I'm sure Kodak wasn't into the whole M&A thing. Et cetera, do you see my point?
    - ganzuul 8y ago
      Is your point that no investigation should be made because coincidences exist? If so, no.

nabla9 8y ago

Soviet scientist Georgii Flerov figured out nuclear weapons program was about to start indirectly from the fact that nothing was being published on nuclear fission and physicists in the field didn't publish at all. That was during MAUD era before Manhattan project was started. Flerov informed Stalin April 1942, serval months before Cambridge Five leaked the MAUD papers to Staling.

weinzierl 8y ago
Asimov used this idea in his excellent short story "Spell My Name with an S" from 1958. Dr. Kristow said stolidly, "Executed!" "He might have been. Ordinarily, I would even assume so, though the Russians are not more foolish than we are and don't kill any nuclear physicist they can avoid killing. The thing is there's another reason why a nuclear physicist, of all people, might suddenly disappear. I don't have to tell you." "Crash research; top secret. I take it that's what you mean. Do you believe that's it?" [...] "Has it been decided that we're to go on shield research, too?" "Yes." Kristow's hand went back over his short, bristly hair, making a dry, whispery sound. "We're going to give it everything we've got. Knowing the papers written by the men who disappeared, we can get right on their heels. We may even beat them to it. —Of course, they'll find out we're working on it." "Let them," said Brand. "Let them. It will keep them from attacking. I don't see any percentage in selling ten of our cities just to get ten of theirs— if we're both protected and they're too dumb to know that." "But not too soon. We don't want them finding out too soon.
HONEST_ANNIE 8y ago
Modern day scifi version: OpenAI stops publishing their models. There are rumors that Geoffrey Hinton wrote a letter to the president. Deep Mind,Google Brain, FAIR go all silent. AI researchers stop updating their twitter and don't respond to email. Zero publications to NeurIPS 2020 from the best groups. Then someone spots few of those guys buying coffee near NSA's Utah Data Center. That center seems to grow and grow. In the China Baidu Research goes silent as well. Strange lights are seen on the desert sky....

aliswe 8y ago

"What he uncovered was shocking." ... Ugh

qubex 8y ago
There must be a wizard in some word processor I haven't yet come across for making “clickbait articles”. It must feature a template with “shocked at what he found out” and “reached out to” as mandatory fill-ins.

jellicle 8y ago

The US government undertook real and widespread environmental monitoring of radioactivity from at least 1947, and perhaps earlier. Many samples were taken of air, water, soil, vegetation, human bone and other materials to understand the extent of radioactive fallout. There were international incidents around test fallout in the early 1950s. It was a major political issue in the early 1950s. Presidential candidates RAN on this issue. Consciousness of the problems of test fallout resulted in an above-ground test ban treaty. The US's last above-ground test happened in 1962. So this was a problem that started in 1945, was well known to the general public within a few years, and was solved by 1962. This is obviously not perfect. But it certainly isn't the case that it was ignored until 1997 and people were only finding out about it then.

trhway 8y ago

>Finally the company and the government came to an agreement. The AEC would provide Webb, by now the head of Kodak's physics division, with schedules and maps of future tests so that Kodak could take the necessary precautions to protect its product. In return, the people of Kodak were to keep everything they knew about the government's Nevada nuclear testing a secret. it is good to be a Big Business! The hush-hush behind the closed doors between the government and the Big Business reminds another similar case of dealing with a national scale "radioactive fallout" - mortgage bonds/CDS of 2008.

nyolfen 8y ago

relatedly, nytimes posted this interview yesterday with american soldiers who were exposed to a nuclear blast in the 50s, some of whom experienced health issues later in life. their description of what it was like (from close enough to be knocked over while sitting down and facing away by the blast wave) is awesome, in the old, bad sense: https://youtu.be/FokopVKMgdU https://youtu.be/FokopVKMgdU

mistrial9 8y ago

related reading .. The Firecracker Boys, by Alaskan author Dan O'Neil .. recommended https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_O%27Neill_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_O%27Neill_(writer)

archgoon 8y ago

This throws some light as to why Kodak had weapons grade uranium in one of their labs. https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/15/us/new-york-kodak-uranium/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/15/us/new-york-kodak-uranium/ind... At the time, to me (not having had this bit of context), it seemed like overkill, but it sounds like they've had a actually been involved for a long time, with associated business concerns, with dealing with the impacts of nuclear processes.

User23 8y ago

It's worth remembering that Kodak was one of the premier high technology companies of its day. George Eastman endowed MIT and other technical schools, because his fortune was built on the work of scientists and engineers. Even well into the 80s and even early 90s they had top notch scientists, engineers, and inventors working for them. The late era management is a different story entirely and serves as a cautionary tale.