¡Colores!; 610; Trinity: Getting the Job Done; Ben Benjamin Studio Interview 2

Yeah, I mean did it. I want to get back to that more relaxed thing that we got to last time. That's possible. I don't know if it could be possible for me if I was under the gun. But, you know, I'd like you to say that this is one coopy guy, you know, who knew Wallace had these snakes and he was saving them. And God, it was the weirdest thing I ever saw. And here we are working on the atomic bomb and this guy is collecting stacks. Yeah. That's a kind of that. I think you should. Yeah, I put it in a more. It's not a technical discussion after all. Exactly. Yeah. And I don't want to give that impression. So that's what I'm kind of. Yeah. It's been good. You know, I mean, we've heard so much about, you know, the plutonium, you know, the carousel material and, you know, I'm looking for your experiences and what you saw and what you believed in and why you were there. Relax.

Let's technical aspects. I'm wrong. Okay, cool. Tell me about being had a trinity. What was your first reaction? Well, first reaction was really a relaxation. We'd been busy up there at the hill and bust in our butts, getting the job done. And here we were free to get a vehicle and we're on our way to southern New Mexico. And while we weren't supposed to stop, we had very limited places we could stop to eat and fuel up. We, when there's one or two of us, we didn't pay much attention to that rule. And we stopped where we wanted to. And here was a bit of freedom that were in the military. And we were confined pretty much to Los Alamos, but it was great to get out. And that was one of the first experiences really.

And here we have all this freedom. That's right. I mean, you got out of both crates, wound up on the hills. Yeah. Very strange circumstances. And now suddenly we have something where we really got an interesting job to do and we're more or less free. Well, I said, maybe kind of less because once we got the trinity, we were locked in except for a few occasions when we snuck out around the guard system and got to town. So you went into Sicara? No, we didn't go to Sicara. We went to, well, I wanted to go to White Sands. And one of my buddies was willing to go with me. So we set it up with the boss. We were going out and work on one of the camera stations. We were going out to West 10,000. And we had to point the cameras at the tower and we had the guys down there turn on the light so we could have something to get in the center of the frame of the camera, make sure we were properly pointed. So we had done some of that at night and this particular night we said, hell, we're going to town.

And there was moonlight and we got in the Jeep and took some extra gas, a couple of blitz cans full of gas. And we drove on to, we got about a mile from the guard station on the road where the MPs were. And they weren't to let us out. They were everybody, all of GIs there were confined. But we turned off the lights and turned off the road and went, made about a one mile circle around this guard station. There was enough moonlight where we could see around the Yaka bushes and well we had a few little problems. We did indeed get past them and they had a big generator to run the lights at the station. So they couldn't hear anything there and we had to know that. So we got out and we went to, let's see, it was night. But we wound up in Las Cruces and that's almost as far as Albuquerque from Trinity. And we had a couple of beers and we weren't in uniform. We were in some old coveralls.

But there were no, there's no military establishment there. We just had a good time and came back. We had a little gas problem on the way. We decided we didn't have enough gas to get back. But we came to a road construction project. And those days they had kerosene torches along the road. And these torches each had a, maybe a quart of kerosene in it. So we gathered up, we gathered up several of these, put out the torch and dumped the kerosene and mixed it with what gasoline we had left. We barely made it back camp by, it was close to dawn when we got back. But we had beat the system and made it. So we felt good about that. Had to go to work right away. Tell me about when you were going down and you said you had some freedom. Like did you stop at restaurants and get some real food?

Yeah, we, first couple of trips, we were only supposed to stop at one place in Berlin. That's where we could eat. And we could get gas. Only in Albuquerque at a core of engineers station, forgotten where it was in Albuquerque, but we were pretty limited. And we had travel orders, very strange travel orders. If we were stopped by a policeman, these orders read from Bruns General Hospital, which was a Santa Fe General Hospital, military hospital, to Fort Bliss, Texas. So this was a fraudulent travel order and never had to use it, never got stopped by a cop. Don't know what would have happened had we been stopped. So what did you, did you guys stop for lunch? Yeah, we had this one place and the first few trips, that's where we stopped. But then as we were there several months, we found we could stop wherever we wanted, really.

And normally there's no problem. Sounds like you guys were willing to bend the rules a little bit in order to have some freedom. Yes, indeed, we were. It was, well, a couple of us who had been in the Army long enough to know sort of the kinds of rules that you could, that you had pay attention to and those that you could bend a little. And we did that. I don't think we got, we compromised the project reading, but we did indeed bend the rules a bit. Getting down there, Michael. Okay, so we're all, I'm telling you about, I'm going to do the thing with the Bainbridge again, or what do you want to do? Yeah, just talk about some of your experiences and you can certainly compact them, being down there in this landscape. You know, boy from Minnesota. Yeah, here, parts of Trinity were so interesting.

Here's a kid from Minnesota. I'm down there in this New Mexico desert where terrain is completely different than anything I'm used to. And Alan, it was, it was pretty interesting. And the rattlesnakes were, we're a subject to everyone talked about. No one ever got bit as far as I know by a rattlesnake down there. And as I've said, my friend collected them. And we don't know you said that. Yeah, we had a, you know, a young guy from Illinois is in our outfit. He was a sergeant and he did a lot of the photographic things that were to be done down there. But he had a strange characteristic. He wanted to gather up those snakes, which he did. He built a cage for them, put it right next to our photo building.

And guys, all the guys that come around and look at earning snakes. And he had a collection box on the back of his Jeep. And he had special fork sticks. And sticks was loops on the end. And so he got pretty proficient at collecting snakes. And he collected enough that it was really a menace. And one night they got out. I don't know whether the dog had anything to do with that or a coyote or what. But now the snake's got out and they all over base camp the next morning. It's scared to hell out of a lot of people. And Lieutenant Bush came around to Ernie and told him in no uncertain terms, many of which I couldn't say a year, that he had to get rid of those snakes, which he did. And that was the end of Ernie's snake gathering project. Tell me about being there and the kind of anticipation you might have had about what was going to happen. Yeah, it has to, to the big event which was going to happen soon.

We were, we were all pretty excited about that too. And there were all kinds of rumors around camp about what was going to happen. And there was even a rumor that this bomb was going to light the atmosphere on fire and destroy the earth essentially. It's scared to hell out of the military guys, they're all of us non-physicists. And so that was a big topic of discussion and was, was denied by anybody in authority there. And turns out in reading the book since then that there was concern. And I think it was teller was given or was it baited. One of the physicists spent a lot of time and finally determined that that was impossible. What were you thinking about? What did you think it was going to happen? Well, I just didn't know. I was just, I didn't know.

I knew it was going to be a big explosion. And in May we'd had a hundred, a hundred tonshot. I think it was May. Yeah. May we had a hundred tonshot on a tower. It was a sort of a dry run for Trinity. And we stood at our six mile station and watched that hundred tons and at six miles. I was very disappointed. That thing was just like a firecracker. Even though it had been a, I believe the biggest HE explosion up to that moment. But at six miles I was expecting something bigger than that. So the day of Trinity was absolutely incredible what's the brightness of that explosion. And many times the brightness of sunlight. And so I didn't really know what to expect. And there were people there saying, well, it's probably going to go a few tons and others. 20,000, 40,000 tons were some of the guesses people were making.

I wasn't privy to all of that. But I, some of the rumors were floating around among the GI technicians. What did you have to do there? I mean, not necessarily your specific job. I mean, really, what was the photographic team? What was their mission? Well, the photo team was to do all the, one of the big projects there. Maybe the biggest was the effort to gather data that photographically. The brightness would be an important factor in determining the yield. And the size of the fireball was an important factor that couldn't be measured any other way. We were there to gather data that couldn't be gathered otherwise. Well, coming from the specific things you did to get that data, what, you know, the cameras of this high speed? Oh, yeah. We had lots of instrumentation. We had all of it, not all. A lot of our 35, all I think all of our 35 millimeter cameras were operating at 100 pictures a second.

We had lots of 16 millimeter cameras that were operating at various speeds from slow to very high speed. And the biggest problem was nobody knew how bright this thing was going to be. How do you set the aperture of your camera? How do you set the speed of framing rate of your camera? And these were problems. The only thing we could do, our bosses decided, well, we're going to have at least three sets of cameras. We're going to have one set set for a dud won't put out much light. We'll have one set for a medium-sized event and one set set set for the very highest yields. And that's really what we did. We had lots of cameras. It was, I have been involved in atmospheric shots at the Nevada test site since then. And I think Trinity was, had more cameras and more photographic instrumentation than any of the events since then. It was really a while instrument and we were there months beforehand setting up.

We had spectrographs while we had a spectrograph, a hilder spectrograph built in England. And we had it operating at West 10,000. We had pinhole cameras. We had a few still cameras, ordinary still cameras. And we had, excuse me. Let's figure out, because you hit something I really liked. I mean, don't let it go away to say, and Julian Mack even had a pinhole camera, the strangest thing. He had a pinhole camera, though. I'm sorry. Yeah, okay. Go ahead. Yes, we even had a pinhole camera. We had every kind of camera. And our boss, Dr. Mack, had decided he wanted a pinhole picture. We built a camera with a tiny, we had a real thin sheet of brass. We put a tiny pinhole in it.

And we had a sheet of film in the focal plane, which was 40 inches long and at least a foot wide. And I should say long. That was in height. We had 40 inches high. So we could, if the fireball was bright and rose rapidly, we'd get an image of it. And you've seen the picture of it. It's reasonably spectacular, I think. Nothing like the motion picture coverage, but it was a very worthwhile project. And we also had a, we had a, Julian had a guy at Mount Wilson Observatory built a thermopile, which was concerned about the temperature of the fireball would be. And it's a very difficult thing to measure. So we put this, the idea was to put this thermopile, which is just a whole series of thermocouples into a very tiny wire. And we put it in the focal plane of a lens, a fixed lens, that would look at the tower.

And it was felt at the temperature of the explosion of the ball of fire could be measured with us. And the boss sent me to Albuquerque to meet Dr. Edison Pettit, was his name. A guy that was well known for his ability to build these very difficult thermopiles. And I went to Albuquerque to meet the super chief and meet Edison Pettit, who would be on that, and he'd have a package for us, which I did. Nobody, I had no idea what Edison Pettit looked like, but I went to the Santa Fe station in Albuquerque and a few people got off. And one gentleman there and older guy with a box in his arms, and I just decided that's going to be Dr. Edison Pettit. And sure enough, it was. And so I gathered the package from him, and he had a lot of questions, which I couldn't answer for. He want to know what that was really going to be, it used for and where,

and I couldn't tell him these things, but said, my goodbyes, put it in the vehicle and took off for Trinity. That was an interesting, and I do not remember what results we got from that, but it was a unique experiment there. Let's stop for a second. More layman's terms. Well, what was the unique piece of equipment I'm referring to the pinhole? Well, one of the most interesting photographic gadgets we had was a pinhole camera. Our boss, Julian Mack, insisted that we have pinhole camera. And just why he won't do this, I'm not sure. But he was, he had his way, and we, at West 10,000, we put in a, that his design of a pinhole camera, which had a piece of film in the focal plane. It was 40 inches long, and I think at least a foot wide.

As I recall, it was, it was the biggest piece of film that Kodak could make for us in those days. And it was a high speed film, which really didn't need to be, because we overexposed it to a large degree. But the picture was really quite good. It provided some good data, and Julian was very proud of it. I remember that. Tell me more about some of the camera people. Say you had some really high speed stuff, you had some special camera. Yeah, I think it was 1,000 yards west. We had a camera station encased in lead, because of the ionizing radiation that would be present that close in. We wanted to protect the film from that kind of gamma radiation that would blacken it. So we had 13 inches of lead all around this station. We had four FastX cameras, which had been requisitioned in purchase from Western Electric. It was a unique camera in those days.

It would take up to 10,000 pictures a second. Now this is really high speed photography. And we had used those at Los Alamos for primarily pictures of the explosions and the development of the various parts of the bomb. So we were familiar with them and took them down to Trinity, built this special container, in case them all in lead. And they looked through a special leaded glass that I understand was made in Belgium, of all places. But we had 13 inches of this leaded glass, which was also called X-ray glass. And the cameras looked straight up, rather than looking at the tower, because the prompt radiation from the explosion would have gone through that glass and blackened the film. So the cameras looked up through this shelter. And we had mirrors on top that essentially pointed the cameras at the cab on the top of the tower. And we had buried in the ground beside it, we had 6 and 12 volt car batteries that were seriesed together to provide 200 volts of direct current.

And these were 100 volt, essentially 100 volt mortars. So these cameras were going at their top rate. And they indeed got very good pictures. The film was blackened to some degree from the ionizing radiation, but the lead protection was pretty good. And those now those in strips of photos that we see praying with the emerging gas bomb bubble. Right, exactly. But some of the signal towers. Exactly. Yeah, the signal towers we didn't think about. But as the fireball grew, it...