Monday, July 16, marks the 62nd anniversary of the first test of the atomic bomb. It took place at the White Sands Test Site outside Alamogordo, N.M., and turned 640,000 square yards of sand into glass.

This earth shattering hallmark was made possible, in part, by four faculty members of St. Procopius College, now Benedictine University.

It’s a legacy that began at 2:35 p.m. Dec. 2, 1942. Enrico Fermi, head physicist of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago, ordered the cadmium rods pulled out of a vessel of water containing enriched uranium, and the first controlled nuclear reaction was achieved.

Among those who helped to reach this scientific milestone were the four professors who would later establish the Physics Lab at Benedictine; they guided the school to become one of the leading physical sciences programs in the Midwest.

Despite their contributions to history, including electrical power through nuclear generation and the bomb that ended World War II, these men and women have gone largely forgotten.

Their ledger books and personal correspondence had been moldering away in the basement of a campus building that was torn down two years ago. There they remained, lost to time, until moved to the new Kindlon Library, where the books, binders and letters were left in a jumbled pile on the floor.

Then, in late summer 2006, the school hired Benn Joseph, one month out of the University of North Carolina, as Benedictine’s historian, and on a visit to the library storage area, he happened upon the boxes by chance.

“I had no idea what they were,” he said.

He looked at the meticulously kept notes with their intricate sketches of something obviously scientific, but what it related to remained a mystery. Many of the documents had “Top Secret” or “Classified” stamped on them, so he jotted down the names and started checking the Internet for any details.

Much of it was restricted information, though, so he found only one with any public references to it.

That name was A.A. Michelson. Michelson was the scientist who established the Physics Department at the University of Chicago in 1892 and received the Nobel Prize 15 years later for his calculation of the speed of light.

With him was Thomas J. O’Donnell, who, in 1942, was the special assistant in charge of shops for the Manhattan Project. In 1964, he left the nuclear research program and joined the faculty of what is today Benedictine University.

Another professor who worked beside them and under the legendary Arthur Compton, head of the Metallurgy Lab at the U. of C., was William Jesse. Jesse had come from the South Side Chicago school in 1934 after graduating from there in 1920.

He was named chief of instruments for the Manhattan Project and was responsible for the delicate gauges, called counters, that were set up at the east end of the reactor.  It was these counters that proved the first-ever controlled nuclear reaction had occurred.
Also, there was Rose Carney. She was not full time with the University of Chicago staff, but spent 10 summers as a research assistant with them at Argonne National Laboratory, where the reactor was moved to in 1943.

Five years into her summer internships, she was hired by the predecessor of Benedictine University, as the first female professor at the school. She remained a popular math teacher almost until her death in March.

Few peers are around now to tell her story, and regrettably, she never did.  Professor Ralph Meeker is one of the only two still on staff that remembers her from the early days.

He said she didn’t speak of her experiences, and that even though all the students knew of her role in the Manhattan Project, she wouldn’t share with anyone what those secrets were.

“We were just sort of in awe of her,” he said.

Joseph, who’s still rifling through the great number of papers relating to all of them, hopes that once he has assessed the larger picture of how each of the faculty members contributed to the bomb, a comprehensive exhibit will be mounted to assure the university’s brush with history will not be forgotten.

That may be awhile, he acknowledged, as he attempts to fuse sporadic information from thousands of pages in to a larger, brighter picture.

“I want to do this because whey you think of the Manhattan Project, you usually don’t think of Benedictine University,” he said.