The Manhattan Project is well-known for delivering the atomic bomb to the world, but what many may not be aware of are the links it had to Ballarat.
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Of the three Australian scientists working on the secret scientific plan to end Japan’s involvement in the Second World War, two of them were from Ballarat, says former journalist Chris Evans.
Sir Mark Oliphant recruited Harrie Massey and Eric Burhop from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University to work as atomic physicists on the project in 1943 and 1944.
The two Melbourne University graduates were colleagues, having worked together in the 1930s furthering the quantum theory on the inner-shell ionization of atoms first described by Dirac.
Sir Harrie Stewart Wilson Massey was born in Invermay on May 16, 1908. His father had been a miner and later owned a sawmill. A brilliant student, he finished his merit certificate at high school in four years, rather than the usual eight.
He was awarded scholarships to England, where his brilliance was recognised in a number of books and papers he wrote or co-wrote on wave mechanics, atomic particles, and mathematical physics.
Eric Henry Stoneley Burhop was born in Hobart on January 31,1911. His parents were Salvation Army officers and often moved. He arrived in Ballarat with his two older sisters Edna and Vera in 1923.
Burhop attended Ballarat High School (which then did not admit until Year 9) for most of his secondary education, receiving his Leaving Certificate (Year 11) in 1926. He then attended Melbourne High School for his final year.
According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Burhop joined the British group working on the Manhattan Project. Led by Massey, they worked at Berkeley, California, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the separation of uranium isotopes by electromagnetic means. With David Bohm and others, he carried out theoretical analyses of the atomic collision processes involved.
Eric Burhop adhered to socialist principles all his life. Like Robert Oppenheimer, his adherence to left-wing politics caused him grief in later life, with security services opening a file on his activities.
But Oliphant, Massey and Burhop also became Fellows of the Royal Society, Britain's prestigious 356-year-old national academy of science.
In the years after the war, Massey also helped develop the Skylark rocket for high-altitude research above the Woomera Rocket Range.
