In early August 1948, Fermi wrote another letter to Davis. The high school teacher revised the opening chapters, but they still were unsatisfactory to Fermi, who marked them up for further revision. He also felt that Davis had added enormously to the word count, perhaps doubling Laura’s translation. By the end of August 1948, Fermi took the time to read the drafts more carefully and his verdict was even more negative: “Unfortunately, I find that the manuscript is still in a very unsatisfactory shape, and I am afraid that it will be so even after the corrections I am suggesting are incorporated into it. I am afraid that the trouble is much more serious than I realized.”
Realizing the seriousness of the problem on their hands, the editors at Macmillan decided to step in and review the manuscript that Davis had presented to Fermi. They made some minor changes to one chapter, which Fermi seems to have approved, although he must have cringed at the editors’ decision to replace the term velocity—which has a very precise meaning in physics—with the term speed, which has a precise, but different, meaning. By this time, the process had become quite confusing, with Davis, aware of the looming deadline, sending a spate of draft chapters to Fermi and to Macmillan for review and editing. It took Fermi a few months to review and revise chapter four, and he submitted it to Macmillan in mid-March 1949, now some five months past the deadline. Macmillan agreed it was a major improvement over Davis’s draft.
The next letter in the file is a draft of correspondence from Fermi to Davis, which must have been sent some time later. It is a disavowal of the entire project. Fermi criticizes Davis for not following the original book more closely. He observes that the language in places seems more suited for “younger children.” The draft of the letter ends with Fermi’s concern that he no longer could afford to continue the collaboration, but this sentence was crossed out. Because the actual letter he sent does not exist in the file, it is difficult to know what the final version said.
Some four years after the original deadline, in November 1952, Macmillan wrote a letter to Fermi acknowledging his decision to end the project. The long-suffering editor, Martin Robinson, put it this way:
I am sincerely sorry that the plan did not work out to everyone’s satisfaction, and personally regret any misunderstandings that may have developed. Needless to say, I still hold you and your work in the highest esteem and hope that if you find the time to prepare a college text or a reference work, that you will give us an opportunity to show you that we can really make good books without so much struggling.
The project’s disintegration must have been agonizing for everyone involved and its end, some relief, albeit tinged with regret, for Macmillan.
For a host of reasons it is a great pity that the project failed. Obviously, it would have made a significant amount of money for all parties concerned—Macmillan, Davis, and the Fermis. Sticking to the translation provided by Laura might well have proved the best course for everyone. Back in Rome, Amaldi took over the project of updating and revising the Italian textbook, which continues to be a best-seller. When Edoardo passed away, the publishing project passed to his son, Ugo, named after Edoardo’s father, who continues to update it. It has sold more than three million copies to date and is still the basic textbook for high school physics in Italy.
Fermi was interested in the money, but he was more interested in getting the textbook right. He had very high standards and could not bear the thought of a slipshod textbook being published in his name, irrespective of the financial opportunity involved. Davis seems to have been out of his depth and certainly not on the same wavelength as his coauthor. High school students to this day are the poorer for Davis’s failure.
FERMI’S 1940 POCKET DIARY CONTAINS A SEVEN-DIGIT ENTRY FOR July 3—“2,206,634.” It represented a milestone for Fermi. The day before, the US Patent Office issued Fermi and his Rome colleagues a patent for the slow-neutron technique. Gabriello Giannini had filed the patent on their behalf on October 3, 1935, almost a year after the patent was filed in Italy. In the interim, the application had worked its way through the bureaucracy, emerging on July 2, 1940, as a fully registered US patent. Fermi learned of his good fortune the next day and scribbled down the number of the patent for his records.
Thus began a thirteen-year saga, which eventually embroiled the five named inventors—Fermi, Amaldi, Pontecorvo, Rasetti, and Segrè, as well as D’Agostino and Trabacchi, both of whom were promised shares in any royalties—in extensive and complex litigation against the US government.
IT MAY HAVE BEEN CORBINO’S IDEA TO APPLY FOR A PATENT ON THE slow-neutron idea, but Fermi and his colleagues eagerly adopted it as their own. Corbino saw the commercial potential for a technique that could be used to develop new radioactive isotopes for medical use. He could hardly have anticipated that slowing down neutrons would enable physicists to split the uranium atom, much less create a chain reaction. Though the fission weapon did not rely on slow neutrons, slow neutrons created the world’s first controlled chain reaction and were an essential part of the vast reactor facility at Hanford that churned out plutonium for America’s nuclear arsenal. The slow-neutron technique had enormous potential civilian power generation applications as well. To understate the case, the slow-neutron patent was valuable intellectual property.
As the Manhattan Project developed, Fermi, Segrè, and Pontecorvo saw the growing value of their patent, but seeking compensation for its use by the US government was problematic. First, Fermi and Segrè were overwhelmed with work on the bomb and had little time for the administrative or legal effort required to pursue the matter. Second, the true value of the patent was apparent only to those who were cleared to know what was happening within the Manhattan Project. Giannini, even though a US citizen, was not cleared, and of course Amaldi, D’Agostino, and Trabacchi were citizens and residents of Italy, at that point an enemy nation. A third complicating factor was the policy developed haphazardly during the project that all intellectual property arising from it would be signed over to the US government. Fermi and his Manhattan Project colleagues filed applications for at least twelve patents between 1944 and the end of the war related to their work, the most famous being patent 2,708,656, filed jointly by Fermi and Szilard, for the “neutronic reactor.” All of these were effectively the property of the US government and remained classified until the 1950s. It would be another ten years, in the 1960s, before the patents were granted. The slow-neutron patent was filed before the United States entered the war, but pursuing compensation while the war was on would, in the inventors’ view, run afoul of the way the US government was handling intellectual property related to nuclear weapons. A fourth issue was the uncomfortable fact that Amaldi, D’Agostino, and Trabacchi were all Italian citizens living in Rome and thus enemies of the US government.
Nevertheless, Fermi and Segrè made several ineffective attempts to discuss compensation for the slow-neutron patent with the relevant Los Alamos lawyers, Navy captain Robert Lavender and his assistant, Ralph Carlisle Smith. After the war, and as the most business-minded of the group, Segrè was chosen to liaise with Giannini and Lawrence Bernard, the Washington, DC, lawyer Giannini chose to represent the team, but the end of the war only further complicated matters.
The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 rendered the entire nuclear industry a monopoly of the US government. Previously, Giannini and Bernard negotiated with Captain Lavender in Vannevar Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). OSRD proposed a variety of compensation schemes, initially offering a lump sum settlement of $900,000. However, with the 1946 act’s creation of the AEC, the jurisdiction of the dispute shifted to the commission’s office responsible for patent work.
The change of jurisdiction introduced a myriad of new delays. The AEC would not engage in serious negotiations before establishing its own set of policy guidelines, which took several years to complete. The slow-neutron patent was but one of many the AEC had to consider. When Bernard finally filed for compensation in October 1948, Giannini told him
to suggest $1.9 million: $1 million as a lump sum payment and nine annual payments of $100,000. Bernard did as he was told but also suggested that the inventors would settle for the original $900,000 offered by Bush in 1946. Bennett Boskey, a lawyer in the Office of the General Counsel of the AEC, was assigned to examine the claim.
An Ivy League lawyer, Boskey vigorously defended the AEC’s monopoly on nuclear science and wrote his report accordingly. It was, as scholar Simon Turchetti puts it, “not good news” for the inventors. Boskey questioned whether the slow-neutron method was essential for the production of fissionable material. Undaunted by the facts and not a scientist, he rejected the claim that the basic R&D for the Manhattan Project relied on slow neutrons. He also painted a demonstrably false picture suggesting that the work of Rutherford and Chadwick held priority over the work of Fermi’s team in 1934. He also claimed the production of radioactive isotopes did not rely on the slow-neutron method. In short, he systematically rejected every one of the patent’s claims, an astonishing performance given that a trained US patent examiner had actually granted the Italians a patent almost two decades previously.
To muddy the waters even further, he darkly noted the 1947 treaty ending hostilities between the United States and Italy entitled the United States to ignore any property or commercial claims made by Italian nationals like Amaldi, D’Agostino, and Trabacchi. To top it off, he argued Fermi’s membership in the GAC made him an employee of the US government and therefore it was a crime for Fermi to litigate against the US government. Irritated, Fermi contemplated resigning from the GAC to clear up the conflict but was able to persuade the AEC that his impending departure from the GAC in January 1951 would solve the problem.
Boskey was smart enough to realize that this first, highly aggressive salvo would shake the confidence of the inventors and he was right. However, their confidence took a greater hit when one of the inventors, Bruno Pontecorvo, took the occasion of a summer holiday in Italy to disappear with his wife and reappear in Moscow. Intelligence services quickly discovered his defection, which was publicly reported in October 1950 by Reuters.
THE PROCESS OF LITIGATION AGAINST THE AEC STIMULATED THE FBI to review the backgrounds of all the inventors. Their attention came to rest on the left-leaning Pontecorvo, all of whose siblings were members of the Communist Party in Italy. Bruno was known to be sympathetic to Communist causes, as well. Reports on the FBI research were passed along to British authorities at MI5 and MI6. British security officials determined that although there was nothing definitive to cause concern it would be wise to place Pontecorvo in a less sensitive position. The unmasking of Klaus Fuchs in 1950 as a Soviet agent landed Pontecorvo under even greater scrutiny. The exact circumstances that caused him to defect when he did are not known, but it is possible that he was tipped off by the British liaison to US intelligence in Washington, Kim Philby, who had been working as a double agent for the Soviet Union for decades.*
The news of his defection came as a shock, especially to the other litigants, who now felt that their position had been terribly compromised. Segrè, perhaps the closest to Pontecorvo, decided it would be best for everyone if he resigned as the liaison with the legal team, and Rasetti, who had found a position at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, took his place. Negotiations dragged on until, eventually, the sides agreed on a disappointing $300,000 lump sum payment, far less than they expected and far less than they felt they deserved. After paying out the approximately $180,000 of legal fees, each litigant was left with a little less than $30,000. Pontecorvo obviously never got his share.
At that time, $30,000 was a significant sum, enough money to buy a grand house in the Hyde Park section of Chicago. The inventors had, however, been expecting millions. For Fermi, the whole misadventure was an embarrassment. He indicated privately that he would probably never have pursued litigation at all were it not for the loyalty he felt for the other members of the team. The litigation put him in an extremely awkward position with the AEC, which was paying him a consulting fee as a GAC member and as a Los Alamos consultant.
Nevertheless the outcome seems unjust. The patent was granted prior to US entry into the war, well before the Manhattan Project was organized. The enormous power wielded by the AEC during the immediate postwar years was sufficient to determine the outcome irrespective of the merits of Fermi’s position. The odds were stacked against the Italians and at some deep level they must have known it. Along with Szilard’s chain reaction patent and the Fermi-Szilard patent on the nuclear reactor, the slow-neutron patent remains one of the most important patents in the history of atomic energy. The commercial value of these three patents is quite literally incalculable. The Italians settled not because they wanted to but because, given the circumstances, they had to.
When Fermi received his payment, he made sure to invest immediately in securities, under the heading “The Patent Fund.” As with all of his investments, he tended to the Patent Fund carefully.
* It remains unclear whether Pontecorvo was an active Soviet agent. Frank Close studied the issue carefully and discovered that Philby knew of the FBI’s interest in Pontecorvo. Within weeks, the physicist defected. See Close, Half Life. Others, particularly in Italy, believe he was not working for the Soviets.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
BRILLIANT TEACHER, BELOVED MENTOR
NOT ALL GREAT RESEARCH PROFESSORS ARE GREAT LECTURERS. Rabi and Teller were both world-class research scientists, but by general consensus they were both dismal in the classroom.
In contrast, Fermi was an outstanding lecturer. His teaching in Rome was legendary, and students flocked to summer sessions in the United States to hear him lecture. At Los Alamos, physicists clamored to attend his lectures, particularly after the end of the war. Now, back in Chicago, he threw himself into teaching with renewed vigor. The results were spectacular.
ONE OF THE VERY FEW FERMI LECTURES THAT WE CAN LISTEN TO today is the speech he gave before the American Physical Society in January 1954, when he told the story of his fission work at Columbia. He did not speak from a fully prepared text. After the war he would routinely accept lecture invitations and inform his hosts that he would not be preparing a text of the talk. Instead, he worked from fragmentary notes that gave him topics on which he would elaborate to create an overarching structure to the talk. The Columbia talk exists in print only as a transcription of the recorded version.
He spoke slowly. His voice was deep and heavily accented even in 1954, some fifteen years after he moved to the United States. He could read his audience and when he felt a digression was appropriate—as was the case when he started to describe his work with Szilard—he would take the opportunity to enjoy a good laugh along with the audience.
In contrast to other lecturers who, like Fermi, deliver from fragmentary notes, Fermi knew exactly what he was going to say and delivered each thought in full, complete, grammatically correct sentences. In the frequent long pauses during the talk, one can almost hear him think through each sentence before speaking it. The transcription needs little editing, because he delivered it perfectly.
This speech provides just a hint of why his students, as well as his colleagues, found his lectures so illuminating. No matter how complicated the subject matter, he moved through it slowly, at a pace allowing less gifted students to keep up as well as giving those more gifted students a chance to appreciate Fermi’s specific approach to problem solving: eliminate the extraneous considerations, strip the problem down to its essential elements, and proceed step by step toward solution.
In his brilliant essay on Fermi’s Chicago years, colleague and collaborator Valentine Telegdi notes that Fermi was obsessive about his preparations for course lectures, writing out notes on large sheets of paper to which he would refer during the course of any given lecture. He never showed annoyance with students who did not understand a point the first time around. “On the contrary,” Telegdi writes, “if Fermi had to repeat an explanation he seemed to derive twice the pleasure.�
��
Fermi’s enthusiasm for teaching is evident in the course load he managed throughout his postwar Chicago career. A man of his stature could easily have found ways to do the bare minimum of teaching required, but he consistently taught two or three courses each term. His course load for the academic year 1946–1947 included introductory lectures on physics for undergraduates, the courses that his graduate student Jack Steinberger felt so lucky to work on as a teaching assistant. Fermi taught quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and nuclear physics. He taught virtually every discipline required for an undergraduate physics major and also taught seminars on special topics and high-level research seminars for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. The only period in which he chose not to teach classes, for reasons that are not entirely clear, was from the fall of 1947 through 1948, picking up again in 1949.
One particular course he taught became something of a legend. In the period between 1952 and 1953, he lectured on nuclear physics. His teaching assistants, Jay Orear, Arthur Rosenfeld, and Robert Schluter, prepared mimeographed notes of the lectures for distribution to anyone interested. Word spread that these notes were available, first through the Chicago community and then, incredibly, to other campuses. Requests came in from far and wide until the overburdened secretaries at the physics department office could no longer keep up with the demand. Anticipating a major problem, the three graduate students approached the editors at the University of Chicago Press to see whether they would be willing to lend a hand. The editors were delighted to do so and the mimeographed sheets were compiled into the textbook Nuclear Physics, which sold well for the next three decades. Known among physicists as “Orear-Rosenfeld-Schluter,” its authors never claimed that Fermi wrote it and for his part Fermi never reviewed the manuscript. It was successful simply because the authors took notes that conveyed brilliantly Fermi’s methodical clarity. The book quickly became a classic.
The Last Man Who Knew Everything Page 37