One of the Project's more enthusiastic, ambitious, optimistic and inspirational characters, Ernest Lawrence found it impossible to believe what the District Engineer was saying: Those high school girls they had pulled from rural Tennessee to operate his calutrons in Y-12 were doing it better than his own team of scientists.
In Berkeley, only PhDs had been allowed to operate the panels controlling the electo-magnetic separation units. When Tennessee Eastman suggested turning over the operation of Lawrence's calutrons to a bunch of young women fresh off the farm with nothing more than a public school education, the Nobel Prize winner was skeptical. But it was decided Lawrence's team would work out the kinks for calutron units and then pass control to the female operators.
Then the District Engineer gave Lawrence some surprising news: The "hillbilly" girls were generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs had. And Product was all that mattered.
A gauntlet had been thrown down.
The two men agreed to a production race. Whichever group generated the most enriched Tubealloy over a specified amount of time would win - though "winning" only meant bragging rights for the Engineer or Lawrence.
By the end of the designated contest period, Lawrence and his PhDs had lost handily.
They just couldn't stop fiddling with things, Lawrence thought, trying to make things run smoother, faster, harder. Still, he was surprised.
The District Engineer understood perfectly. Those girls, "hillbilly" or no, had been trained like soldiers. Do what you're told. Don't ask why. He and General Groves knew that was how you got results.
The Girls of Atomic City
The Untold Story of the Women Who helped Win World War Two
Denise Kiernan, pp 217-219
