Bird Seed Physics

Written By: Luke Osteen | Issue: 2020/03 - March

Catherine Taylor’s arrival in the Tessentee community in Macon County 94 years ago wasn’t
terribly auspicious. 

Born critically premature, she weighed in at two-pounds, two-ounces, and looked, in the words of her father, “like a skinned squirrel.”

The attending doctor could offer her parents no reassurance, simply stating that if she could survive through the night then it was possible that she’d live, though she could only be given warm, fresh cow’s milk.

Thanks to around-the-clock care from her parents and what must have been a titanium-enriched will to live, Catherine (or Miss Catherine as she’s known throughout the Plateau) not only survived, but thrived, becoming a hard worker on her family’s farm and graduating from Franklin High School. 

Upon her graduation, she and four other local girls were recruited by a man from a company called Tennessee-Eastman, who offered clerical work for a new project. Since the Second World War was raging and college was too big of a financial stetch, Catherine accepted the job without knowing any details, only that she’d be shipped to Tennessee. 

That place in Tennessee turned out to be Oak Ridge, the secret site of the effort to secure enriched uranium for the atomic bomb that was being developed in Los Alamos, New Mexico. 

Though she didn’t know it at the time, Catherine would be one of the players in a drama that would see the defeat of Imperial Japan and the end of World War II.

“We weren’t allowed to talk about our work, even among ourselves, and we weren’t allowed to say anything in letters home,” she says. “When we arrived in buses at the gates of the facility, all of our suitcases were opened and everything was dumped out on the ground while they went through it. We were stipped down to our underwear and given uniforms steel-toed shoes, and ID badges with numbers, because we were going to work.”

In all, Catherine had to pass through four levels of security just to get to her work site.

Pledged to secrecy and working in a clandestine facility  that stretched over two counties in Tennessee, she labored to sustain a controlled nuclear reaction that would produce weapons-grade uranium. It was a tedious, nerve-racking process that required extreme levels of concentration and a supreme control of her reflexes as she manipulated dials on the massive calutrons that regulated the process. She still didn’t know what the gauges were measuring, but there was no time to relax or contemplate the deeper meanings of those eight hour shifts. 

Since the entire procedure was based on an understanding of cutting-edge particle physics, Catherine’s supervisor told her to imagine that she was measuring and sorting bird seed.

Something about that analogy proved helpful, because Catherine began a controlled reaction that she and her team of women (they were all women who worked in the cubicles in her building) would sustain for up to 600 hours. 

This landmark achievement allowed Oak Ridge to meet the deadline for the desperately needed uranium, although she and her crew didn’t know it – they continued their exacting work in secret.

Finally, one evening in August 1945, she and her co-workers were told that a new kind of bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima in Japan, and that their labors had ensured that this “atomic bomb” was successfully deployed. 

The use of this devastating weapon and another a week later at Nagasaki, forced the Japanese to surrender and brought World War II to a close. 

With the project disbanded, Catherine underwent two weeks of medical testing before she was allowed to leave Oak Ridge and return to the mountains. She says that many of her co-workers, if not most, have died of cancer. 

When you run into Miss Catherine (she still stays busy in her community, especially in the senior JOY Group at Highlands United Methodist Church, activities at First Baptist Church and the Highlands Community Dinners at the Community Building), she comes across as a sweet, quiet woman, who’ll start an easy conversation about virtually any topic you wish. 

You’d never guess that the vital work Catherine did in absolute secrecy helped America win the Second World War.  

by Luke Osteen