Re: graphite story. Wikipedia citation is to a biography of Szilard, and it says: > Fermi and Szilard met with representatives of National Carbon Company, who

Re: graphite story. Wikipedia citation is to a biography of Szilard, and it says: > Fermi and Szilard met with representatives of National Carbon Company, who manufactured graphite, and Szilard made another important discovery. He asked about impurities in graphite, and learned that it usually contained boron, a neutron absorber. He then had special boron-free graphite produced. Had he not done so, they might have concluded, as the German nuclear researchers did, that graphite was unsuitable for use as a neutron moderator. A neat story, and although I haven't checked the citation I don't doubt it says so. But it probably didn't happen that way: many biography anecdotes are like that. Here are some quotes from Voices of the Manhattan Project: Norman Hilberry's Interview (1965) Part 2. Primary source on the history of the Manhattan Project, so to speak. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/voices/oral-histories/norman-hilberrys-interview-1965-part-2/ https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/voices/oral-histories/norman-h... > This was just one of those things that Szilard had been needling the graphite companies for two years to try to get pure graphite. He had been working with the Speer Carbon Company... Boron was the one that we just had to keep out because it has such a terrifically high cross section for neutron absorption... But their facilities, a number of furnaces and so forth, were so few that I went down to National Carbon Company to see if we couldn't get them, now that we knew what had to be done, couldn't get them to start making stuff for us. So it really can't be that Szilard made discovery about boron at meeting with National Carbon Company. Szilard already knew about boron, and developed boron-free graphite production process with Speer Carbon Company. But Speer was too small, so National Carbon Company was contacted to scale up the process.