The S-50 Project was the Manhattan Project's effort to produce enriched
uranium by liquid thermal diffusion during World War II. The process was
developed by Philip H. Abelson and other scientists at the United States
Naval Research Laboratory, and was one of three technologies for uranium
enrichment pursued by the Manhattan Project. Pilot plants were built at
the Anacostia Naval Air Station and the Philadelphia Navy Yard. A
facility at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was the
only production-scale liquid thermal diffusion plant ever built. It
could not enrich uranium sufficiently for use in an atomic bomb, but it
could begin the process of enrichment that was completed by the Y-12
calutrons and the K-25 gaseous diffusion plants. It sped up the
production of enriched uranium for the Little Boy bomb used in the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This plant ceased production in September
1945, but was reopened in May 1946, and used by the Nuclear Energy for
the Propulsion of Aircraft project of the US Army Air Forces before
being demolished in the late 1940s.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-50_(Manhattan_Project)>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
565:
Justinian the Great deposed Eutychius, Patriarch of
Constantinople, after the latter refused the Byzantine Emperor's order
to adopt the tenets of the Aphthartodocetae, a sect of Monophysites.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutychius_of_Constantinople>
1689:
The Convention Parliament convened to justify the overthrow of
James II, the last Roman Catholic King of England, who had vacated the
throne when he fled to France in 1688.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_II_of_England>
1905:
Russian Revolution: Peaceful demonstrators, led by Father
Gapon, a Russian Orthodox priest, were massacred outside the Winter
Palace in St. Petersburg.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1905)>
1924:
Ramsay MacDonald took office as the first British Prime
Minister from the Labour Party.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsay_MacDonald>
1970:
The Boeing 747, the world's first widebody commercial airliner,
entered service for Pam Am on the New York–London route.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
tickety-boo:
(chiefly Britain, informal) Correct, satisfactory.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tickety-boo>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to
the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than
to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.
--Francis Bacon
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon>