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BRIDGE NOT ATTACKED, A: CHEMICAL WARFARE CIVILIAN RESEARCH DURING WORLD WAR II
Author(s): Harold Johnston (Author)
- Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
- Publication Date: January 6, 2004
- Language: English
- Print length: 276 pages
- ISBN-10: 9812381538
- ISBN-13: 9789812381538
Book Description
This book gives an almost forgotten history concerning civilian university scientists, who carried out research on defense against poison gases in some unusual places during World War II. Most of these were graduate students, working under the direction of professors at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California (Berkeley). The first job on these projects was to make major improvements on gas masks. Later, most activities were done outdoors to assess the effects of terrain and meteorological conditions on the travel and dissipation of toxic gas clouds. Action took place in California, Florida, and the jungles of Panama.On these two parallel projects, one young participant was a big, healthy, athletic extrovert, who was deeply trained in the physical sciences, and by age twenty-nine (in 1943) was world famous in physics and in biology. Another was opposite in many ways: a skinny sickly loner, who was minimally schooled in science and mathematics. From the ten principal people working on these two projects, one was killed by accident while experimenting with a poison gas in the laboratory; another was proud of how he had defeated the draft system in an unusual way.
Editorial Reviews
Review
?Although aimed primarily at the general reader, chemists and historians of chemistry will find a great deal of interest …”
About the Author
Harold Johnston, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, has received both the prestigious National Medal of Science and the Tyler World Prize for Environmental Achievement recognizing his outstanding contributions to atmospheric chemistry research. Working from a large, accumulated body of primary writings and photographs from the 1940s, Professor Johnston gives us a fascinating account of his and fellow scientists earliest experiences as young researchers.
