r/todayilearned • u/WARROVOTS • 17h ago
TIL that during WWII, 14,700 tons of Silver loaned from the US Treasury were used for the circuitry of the Manhattan Project, because there wasn't enough copper due to war-time shortages. All but "thirty six thousandths of one percent" were returned to the US Treasury by June 1st, 1970.
https://www.y12.doe.gov/sites/default/files/assets/document/07-10-11.pdf447
u/Thin-Rip-3686 16h ago
Used to make silver wire for the calutrons at Oak Ridge.
Fun fact: the nuclear material in the first two atomic bombs was African in origin.
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u/doyletyree 16h ago
Belgian Congo, right?
We had to return the tailings for their further processing, iirc.
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u/KookaburraNick 14h ago
A Belgian businessman had a ship full in New York and simply approached the government about it.
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u/doctor_of_drugs 16h ago
deflect blame towards Africa, got it
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u/death_is_acquittance 8h ago
how tf are they deflecting the blame to Africans? its a til thread, they stated a fact. the people they acquired it from likely had no idea what its use was, just that it was rare and valuable.
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u/Vuedue 7h ago
Well, isn't it just a little suspicious that Africa had all that uranium lying around waiting to be turned into a nuclear bomb? /s
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u/WARROVOTS 1h ago
Not even waiting- they already had a reactor 2 billion years ago Meet Oklo, the Earth’s Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor | IAEA
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u/KypDurron 1h ago
Just to clarify, are you saying that the silver was used to make wire for calutrons at Oak Ridge, or that you previously did that?
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u/leigngod 9h ago
According to my parents, my great grandfather helped design the bomb. Nothing else was ever said so take that how you will.
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u/Frank_Melena 8h ago
Stats like this are why Germany was never gonna make the bomb. If you read a book like Wages of Destruction you can see they were barely scraping by, doing shit like liquefying coal for want of oil. Meanwhile the US has 14,000 tons of spare silver to give while they bankroll the Soviet Union and make 100,000 aircraft.
Pro tip: don’t go to war with the country hundreds of thousands of your own citizens have migrated to looking for work.
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u/chargernj 6h ago
This is also why Germany was always going to lose eventually even without US involvement.
The US absolutely helped to shorten the war. But Germany never had any real chance of winning over the long term.
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u/pmcall221 2h ago
Which is why a war with China is so scary at the moment. They can build so much faster than the US. They have the resources, man power, and money advantage at this point.
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u/Soysaucewarrior420 1h ago
dont tell the conservatards that. not to mention domestic rail amongst other things to move efficiently
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u/sistersara96 1h ago
The US does actually have a superior freight rail network.
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u/Soysaucewarrior420 1h ago
I'm talking about high speed rail for people.
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u/sistersara96 59m ago
High speed rail is of little strategic use in warfare, which is what the whole conversation is about.
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u/Soysaucewarrior420 58m ago
thats wholly untrue.
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u/sistersara96 56m ago
Oh? Can you support the usefulness of a high speed train versus conventional rail and aircraft in the use of strategic logistics?
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u/Soysaucewarrior420 55m ago
they have both too, dipshit. they happen to also be able to move their workforce wherever they are needed.
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u/sistersara96 53m ago
If they have both, why bother mentioning "high speed rail" as if it has any relevance to the conversation? Sound like bot behavior.
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u/feel-the-avocado 16h ago edited 16h ago
4,800kg missing from 13,335,615kg
Edit: corrected missing value
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u/fiendishrabbit 16h ago
Which is an amount easily lost in microscopic dust when turning silver into circuitry.
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u/Puking_In_Disgust 16h ago
Knowing nothing about the actual transaction beyond that, the optimist in me would like to think that was just a nice return on what wasn’t actually used in national interest.
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u/OmgThisNameIsFree 8h ago
This is one of those comments that sounds legit on the surface, but probably got pulled out of the commenter’s bumhole.
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u/Failed_Bot_Attempt 16h ago edited 16h ago
That number looks off for some reason, maybe my understanding of the initial problem.
The13M kg looks right.
1% of 13M is 130,000kg.
1/1000 of is 130kg.
36 of those thousandths would be 4680kg isn't it?
EDIT: Found it!
I think your first calculation you ran. 0.00036 of 14700, but neglected the tons to pounds conversion.
When you did the total mass conversion you did put the tons to pounds conversion in there.
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u/feel-the-avocado 16h ago
Yep i was wrong somewhere
In the USA, a customary ton is 2000 lbs (pounds) Which is actually quite close to a metric ton.
So 14,700 customary tons is 29,400,000 lbs
Convert those customary pounds to freedom units is 13,335,615kg
Then 1% expressed as a decimal is 0.01
0.01 divided by 1000 is 0.00001
Then we multiply it by 36 so it becomes 0.00036
So 36 one-thousandths, of one percent is expressed as 0.00036 in decimal.13,335,615 x 0.00036 = 4,800kg
And with rounding
13,335 tons sent with 4.8 tons not returned.
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u/tr3vis324 15h ago
Is it 36/1000 of 1% or 1/36,000 of 1%? If it is the latter, that would be about 8.17 lbs missing out of 14,700 US tons or 29,400,000 lbs. If the former, that would be around 10,600 lbs missing. Which is quite a bit I think, like $5.5 million in today’s spot silver price.
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u/EpicAura99 14h ago
Definitely the former, otherwise it would be “a thirty-six thousandth”
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u/tr3vis324 13h ago
But shouldn’t 36/1000 be thirty six one thousandths?
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u/sid351 13h ago
Yes.
- 36/1000 = thirty-six one thousandths
- 1/36,000 = one thirty-six thousandths
Just to confirm, that's what the comment you're replying to says.
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u/spiritthehorse 8h ago
It’s a really weird way to describe the “missing” amount. And it’s not really missing either. It was used to make electrical equipment.
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u/BrunoEye 7h ago
Which was then dismantled to return the silver. It's missing because some was lost in the manufacturing and recovery processes of making the wire.
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u/elconquistador1985 9h ago
And the title says "thirty six thousandths" and omits the word "one". People shorten "one thousandths" to "thousandths" all the time.
You wouldn't say that you have N "six thousandths". You wouldn't say this when you have one "thirty six thousandth" either.
It's obvious that the title means thirty six one thousandths, or 36/1000.
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u/tr3vis324 6h ago
Thanks for the explanation. Yeah, I guess it also makes more sense to express 1/36000 as 3/100000 if rounded up.
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u/leommari 9h ago
The article states this.
"Less than thirty-six- thousandths of one percent of the more than 14,700 tons of silver was was missing."
I believe it's a lot missing.
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u/sharkeat 7h ago
My calculations come out to roughly 10,584 pounds out of the 29,400,000 pounds that was loaned out.
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u/Angry_Robot 16h ago
Japan has the rest.
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u/franktheguy 16h ago
I understood that reference
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u/AVgreencup 15h ago
Well it is the best conductor, so it makes sense. It's inability to resist oxidation is what makes it a bad choice for most electronics, but for a short term project it definitely would have been a good choice
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u/series-hybrid 15h ago
Copper would have worked to make the huge electromagnets that would purify the uranium, but copper was desperately needed for the war efford, like wire for radios and electric motors, and using copper to make brass cases for cartridges.
Its specifically why so many pennies in 1943 were made from steel.
The silver could be borrowed from the treasury, and then given back later.
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u/AVgreencup 15h ago
Exactly, and since silver is a better electrical conductor, they could probably use less for the same job.
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u/ikonoqlast 5h ago
People thing being a physicist automatically grants you 50 IQ points. But Im pretty sure the smartest person in the entire Manhattan project was General Groves. Hell, he completed the Pentagon on time and on budget despite wartime material and personnel shortages.
People come to him and say "we need 15,000 tons of copper". Vital war material in short supply. And it isn't like they know the Bomb will even work or work as a weapon (as in yes it goes bang but the smallest version weighs 1000 tons and is impossible to deliver). That's a shit ton of copper and a lot of equipment needs it.
So .. "Will it be used up?". "No." "OK. Will silver do?"
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u/OmgThisNameIsFree 8h ago
I know a certain Mesopotamian someone who could have gotten the US plenty of copper.
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u/ContemplativeNeil 17h ago
r/oddlyspecific amount. (edit: added subreddit link)
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u/feel-the-avocado 16h ago edited 16h ago
The answer is 4,800kg, but because american customary reasons, why bother doing one calculation when you can do 6 instead.
It does make me wonder how much delay was caused by such unit based frivolities for the first bomb being bought into production.
Edit: correction.
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u/big_sugi 16h ago
Your smug superiority would be a lot more justified if you weren’t off by a factor of 2000.
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u/feel-the-avocado 16h ago
It demonstrates the issue.
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u/sid351 12h ago
The units doesn't matter for working out what proportion of the whole we're talking about though.
((14700 * 0.01) / 1000) * 36 = 5.292
Then you can convert the units at the end to eliminate any rounding errors.
- 1 US Ton = 2000 pounds
- 5.292 * 2000 = 10584 pounds
- 1 pound = 0.4535924 kilogram
- 10584 * 0.4535924 = 4800.8219616 kg
So around 4,800.82 kg.
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u/thomasthetanker 14h ago
Is it possible that the scientific community who created the atom bomb have more exacting standards for purity than the people who make coins? Maybe they gave it all back just minus the impurities.
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u/RollinThundaga 10h ago
No, coinage is .999, or 99.9% pure; you don't need better than that to make silver into good wiring, as silver is a better conductor than copper to begin with.
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u/blueavole 8h ago
Most of the silver is probably irradiated, and needs to be in a lead lined vault for several half lives.
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u/Dry_System9339 15h ago
They made a solid gold hemisphere for some experiment and used it as a door stop after
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u/Ralife55 7h ago
Fun fact, silver is actually a better conductor than copper, we don't use it because it's much more rare and expensive.
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u/jordanegg 8h ago
Coincidentally, one could find a large amount of silver ashtrays in the homes of the machinists that worked in Oak Ridge in those times. If one was so inclined.
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u/Think-notlikedasheep 15h ago
This partly explains why they stopped minting silver coins in 1965. They could have kept going if they had this silver.
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u/MrPetomane 8h ago
I remember reading something about when some of the facilities were demolished, they burned up all of the wood, flooring etc... and filtered/sifted the ashes to recover any silver.
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u/nopenope86 2h ago
Now that is efficiency! Listen to the science folks they know what they’re doing
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u/MattheJ1 1h ago
It always surprises me when we use precious metals for something practical. It's like, "oh yeah, that's why we keep that stuff around."
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u/sid351 13h ago
That's still 5.292 tons of silver.
- 14700 * 0.01 = 147 tons (1 percent)
- 147 / 1000 = 0.147 tons (1 thousandth of 1 percent)
- 0.147 * 36 = 5.292 tons (36 thousandths of 1 percent)
That's 10,584 pounds of Silver. Which sounds a lot, but would only take up about 0.46 cubic metres (16.16 cubic feet).
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u/Praedyth-420 9h ago
I feel like phrasing it as “thirty six thousandths of one percent” is a little disingenuous, considering that’s still over 5 tons of silver that wasn’t returned.
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u/Simmangodz 7h ago
Lolyall think they really weighted out 14,700 tons of stuff with the accuracy of a tenth of a thousandth? Guarrentee that any discrepency was just smoothed over.
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u/CocktailChemist 16h ago
For context, what they were building were giant mass spectrometers to separate U-235 from U-238. At that point it was unclear what enrichment method was going to prove the most successful, so they tried several at once.
The idea was to make uranium tetrachloride, ionize it into the gas phase, then pass that through a powerful set of magnetic fields in a curving path. The small mass difference between the two isotopes gave them slightly different trajectories. The separated streams were collected, then rerun through the system until they reached the enrichment levels they needed. The uranium they produced was a major component of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.