The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

At sixty-three George Braxton Pegram was a generation older than the two Hungarians and the Italian who debated in his office that morning.1120 A South Carolinian who had earned his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1903 working with thorium, he had studied under Max Planck at the University of Berlin and corresponded with Ernest Rutherford when Rutherford was still progressing in fruitful exile at McGill. Pegram was tall and athletic, a champion at tennis well into his sixties, a canoeist when young who enjoyed paddling and sailing an eighteen-foot sponson around Manhattan Island. His interest in radioactivity may have been aroused by his father, a chemistry professor; “probably the most important problem before the physicist today,” the senior Pegram told the North Carolina Academy of Sciences in 1911, “is that of making the enormous energy [within the atom] available for the world’s work.”