One of the few remaining eyewitnesses to the world’s first atomic bomb will reflect on his experiences during World War II at a Heritage Series Lecture scheduled for Tuesday.
Ben Benjamin, who came to Los Alamos in 1944 to design some of the high-speed cameras that recorded the Trinity test, will talk about his work and his relationships with some of the other Manhattan Project pioneers at 1:10 p.m., in the Administration Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3. Benjamin's lecture is unclassified. It will be broadcast on LABNET Channel 9.
“The Trinity test opened a new era in human history,” said Laboratory historian Alan Carr, of Information, Records and Media Services (IM-9), coordinator of the Heritage Series. “We’re fortunate to be able to hear one of the Laboratory’s pioneers discuss the work that went into developing high-speed cameras and recording this major scientific event on film.”
Benjamin, a native of McIntosh, S.D., became an amateur astronomer while growing up in Minneapolis and learned to grind lenses and do other optical fabrication. He worked for Minneapolis Honeywell manufacturing lenses and prisms for the U.S. Army, then joined the army himself and attended the Carnegie Tech Engineering School in Pittsburgh.
He was ordered to report to Lamy, N.M., to work for Julian Mack, a physics professor from the University of Wisconsin who led a project that aimed to build a camera capable of taking a million pictures per second. As a member of the Laboratory’s Photo-Optical group, Benjamin worked on a variety of projects in the field of high-speed motion-picture photography of explosive events.
On Tuesday, Benjamin will show photographs of Trinity and describe the effort to record the explosion with about 50 motion picture cameras.
Benjamin was discharged from the Army in February 1946 and earned a degree in mechanical engineering the following year. He returned to New Mexico, and spent a 40-year career in field testing at Sandia National Laboratories.
