GoKawiilHarvard's Science Center Collection Holds a Nazi-Era Uranium Cube
A writer touring with his novel D: Heavy Water visited the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard's Science Center at the invitation of Executive Director Dr. Joshua Gorman. There he examined a surviving cube of unenriched uranium, one of hundreds used in Germany's wartime attempt to build a nuclear reactor using a chandelier-like array of cubes suspended in heavy water, and also saw a Koenig Analyzer, a 19th-century acoustic waveform device, in the same collection.
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The artifact offers a tangible link to a well-documented but often abstract episode of nuclear history, when Germany's unenriched-uranium reactor program fell short partly due to insufficient material, unlike the Allied effort at the University of Chicago. Surviving cubes like this one, dispersed after the war onto Europe's black market, serve as physical evidence connecting academic collections to major 20th-century scientific and military history.
- Harvard's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments holds an oxidized, unenriched uranium cube from Germany's WWII reactor project.
- The German effort used a chandelier of uranium cubes lowered into heavy water, but lacked enough material to succeed, unlike Fermi's Chicago reactor.
- The same Harvard collection also includes a Koenig Analyzer, a historic device for analyzing acoustic waveforms.
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Published there as: “Historical Scientific Instruments”
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