h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>There must have been all sorts of patentable stuff cropping up as the bomb was being developed, which would normally have been a matter of public record, and could theoretically point someone in the right direction.<<

That's it, in a nutshell.

I think that "piecing all the clues together" is a very kind interpretation. I'd go more with "staggering about until you tripped over the right answer". Thank you anyway.

>>I'd go more with "staggering about until you tripped over the right answer"<<

That strategy has got me to 4th in the QI leaderboard.

I found out the other day that Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam jointly submitted a patent application for their design of the Hydrogen (implosion) Bomb.

My QI wheels began to spin, dreaming of questions about starting nuclear Armageddon and being sued for patent violation.

What I couldn't find any evidence of was whether or not Ulam and Teller's patent was ever approved.

And this got me digging ever deeper into the world of nuclear patents, and it turns out there was more to this story than at first met the eye.

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May 14th 1942, Vannevar Bush approaches William Shurcliff with a job offer. (Shurcliff was a Harvard graduate with a PHd in physics) and was working as a technical liaison in the Office of Scientific Research and Development, that is until that day when Bush recruited him to be the first Censor of Atomic Patents in the newly instituted that afternoon, Manhattan Project Patent Office.


Shurclif was brief the military were developing a new top secret weapon, Shurcliffs background in physics made him an ideal candidate to scrutinise all the -as HD points out - patentable technology that was being developed alongside.

Bush feared that, since the publication of the nuclear fission was already in the public domain, and speculation about chain reaction sustainability was already underway (as evidenced by the recruiting of the leading lights of theoretical physics to the Manhattan Project) private inventors would invent their way into part-owning the technology for the bomb, this was considered an untenable risk to a supposedly secret government program.

The "French Problem" was driving this fear, as it had recently come to light that French scientists were filing multiple patent applications in different legal jurisdictions and negotiating with britain for access to nuclear technology.

Challenging patent ownership in court would risk exposing the US secret weapons research and manufacture. That was the rock, and the hard place was only marginally worse as this meant allowing any patent filed by a private inventor (French or otherwise) if it overlapped with what the government was developing might have to pass through the patent system, where the manufacturing details and ownership rights are publicly published documents and anyone could access them.

Bush solution was the seize control of the patent system under Public Law no 700, which allowed patents to be seized by the government and declared "secret" whereupon they would be unprocessed, gathering dust in the MPPO's vaults.

This was not supposed to be a proprietary move on the part of the government to snatch away legal ownership of technology for it's own gain but in the interests of national security (a fine line) so Shurcliff was chosen because he was not part of the Manhattan project itself so was not conspiring to cherry pick technologies, but had the background to judge new technology submissions for patents and declare them "secret" under the powers he had just been granted by Bush.

He visited The University of Chicago's "metallurgy" department who were constructing Fermi's "Pile" as part of his survey into the work of the physicists, but this swiftly broadened into a programme to locate, examine and "make secret" all non government controlled US patents if they related in any way to the Manhattan Project.

Any patent applications submitted to the patent office (whether by MP scientists or by lay members of the public) that were speculative of nuclear technology (eg prototype reactors, or filtration and separation technologies, only distantly connected to the Nuclear research program were all targeted and their public procession rescinded. This Shurcliff called "putting patents to sleep."

He had one nasty shock, when a patent he had requested be put to sleep was not only granted by the the Patent Office, but appeared in an article on the front page of the New York Times. (That patent belonged to Donald Kerst and was for a magnetic induction accelerator. )

One technological apparatus that was initially put to sleep but later Shurcliif relinquished was The Mass Spectrometer (The CSI connection!) this was done because there were obvious industrial benefits to be had from allowing this technology to remain in the public domain and not bound under the offices of the MPPO.

Shurcliff arranged it so that it was The Patent Office that issued the Secrecy Orders not the OSRD. They came emblazed in bold print "SECRECY ORDER" to the recipient on Patent Office headed note-paper, and explained in explicit detail the secrecy law to which the patent was now subject (do not publish; do not file a patent application abroad - or else!)

When private inventor Sol Wiczer got his letter from the TPO advising him that his patent was subject to a secrecy order - he took this as a sign that the government was interested in his designs. Using his contacts at the TPO, he found out the order had come from the OSRD, his source was even obliging enough to give him Shurcliffs phone number.

After Shurcliff had finished speaking to Wiczer in his office he instituted an immediate review of how someone could have defeated all the layers of security surrounding the censoring programme of the Manhattan Project Patent Office.

This set the cat amongst a flock of very paranoid pigeons, who began to look upon the "lone inventor" long cherished as the Thomas Eddison model of the crackpot /genius inventor with a gold-plated idea, transformed into the idea of a "lone wolf"; rouge agents of foreign powers attempting to spy on the US program by means of submission of mock patents and selective querying and scrutiny of secrecy orders they feared they could reverse engineer the bomb.

Indeed as a measure of control the patent seems perverse to say the least - the reason lay really in the sheer novelty of the thing under construction at Los Alamos. Nothing like this had ever been done before, the legal structures to contain it simply didn't exist, so they used what was available and in a legal context this did the job.
The Patent enshrines exclusive control (a monopoly on intellectual property) for a period to the owner of the patent, what the Government had done was to selectively and defensively seize control of all the patents that related to the creation of atomic weapons from the mining of the raw ore, to the process of developing the fuel to the manufacture of the centrifuges, bombs cases, proximity and altitude triggers, not to mention the systems of fission control.

This marks the beginning of what we would today recognise as the international operation to control nuclear material (recall the fuss over the sourcing of yellow-cake during the Iraq war; the present fuss about Iran's centrifuges and the reports by the I.A.E.A. the notion of *international* co-operation on atomic issues is familiar to us, but this came later, the first and earliest measure of control that was exercised was the strategic (and successful) seizure of patents in order to ensure control of the "atomic secret"

General Groves wrote on the 21st August 1943 to Vice President Wallace and General George C Marshall demonstrating this manner of thinking

"If the possibility of world disaster through the development of super-explosives and it's possible military by-products is to be aoided and the enormous hazard invovled in preparation minimised the utlisiation of atmoic power must always be under the close control of governments interested in the welfare of mankind rather than in absolute domination of and exlploitation of other peoples. If the United States is in a strong patent position the achievement of the above will be facilitated."

The "Prima Donnas" according to General Groves (including men like Fermi) all had patent submitted on "their" designs. One of Shurcliff's great early triumphs was to make seizure of patent rights part of the contract of working at Los Alamos.
There were still a few boobs, like the patents that were approved before scientists joined the programme such as those which belonged to scientists who worked for the University of California and which concerned the chemistry of uranium and basic processes of fissile materials. They were persuaded to give these rights up during the war, the compensation the OSRD policy would have remunerated in their direction was a paltry $1. However after the war the Atomic Energy Commission awarded them $100,000 each. still miserly amounts for what the patents were worth but better than nothing..

About the AEC: The Manhatten Project patent Office ceased to exist in 1946, when the Atomic Energy Act transferred control of the atomic programme from the war offices that had run it for the duration of the war. The bold numbers are pretty staggering.

By the 1st of January 1947 , over 8,500 technical reports had been examined 6,300 notebooks scrutinised and 5600 different inventions from raw materials to the atom bomb itself with 2,100 patent applications submitted of which 1250, had actually been filed with the US Patent office. From Some 1300 patents originated from Los Alamos itself, submitted between 1943 and 1946; at least 60 were held in check by the government for 5 years and more than 35 were not released back to the patent applicant for over 10 years. The Longest delay on record for a patent not returned to its rightly owner was for a chemical process related to gaseous diffusion - this was held back for nearly 60 years, having been submitted in September 1945, it was finally granted in July 2004.


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QI - Penning an Open Letter.

The etymological root of "patent" from Latin: "patentum" meaning "to lie open", and a later old French derivative "patente" which became in 1376 "Lettre Patent" meaning "an Open Letter"
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=patent

"Penning: transitive verb - to confine to a restricted space

QI - Penning an open letter.
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Correct (+3)
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Iago (35) - "The sharing of Nuclear Secrets."
GT (41) - "Vannevar Bush"
HD (15) - "Patents"


QI Bonus (+6)
------------------------

None Awarded.


DGI Bonus (+1)
------------------------

Iago (4) - "Part of a coming war"
Iago (24) - "espionage"
Taff (32) - French deal with Britain
Vip (72) - "Seal of Approval / Scientific Research
Iago (81) - "A smart spy might be able to analyse"
GT (100) - for persevering.
Taff (112) - How to build a super-weapon"
Pedro (124) - "raw materials eg. 'Silver'"
HD (141) - "Something Governmental"
HD (158) - "All sorts of patentable stuff was beign developed couldpoint someone in the right direction"



Klaxon (-5)
------------------------

Malabarista (2) - "Condoms"
GT (84) - "Nazis"
GT (84) - "Communists"



Elf Bonus (+2)
------------------------
Clive.




Total to be added or subtracted.
------------------------

Iago +6
HD +5
Taff +2
Clive+2
Vip +1
Pedro +1
Mal -5
GT -6

So sitting pretty with a radiant golden glow (or possibly he just radioactive) - it's Iago with +6

Trundling around like a mad-thing in a wheelchair snapping off nazi salutes with a zombified hand: it's the strangely Kubrickian, Merkwürdigliebe, HygenicDispenser on +5

But oh my. Who'll be spending some quality time at our Guantanamo Bay summer camp for naughty scamps?

Languishing in obscurity at the back of the censor's stationary cupboard dawbed in wax crayon it's the barely legible scrawl of Gandalf'sTwin on -6. Oh dear.



We shall part over these lyrics of the supreme word-smsith Tom Leher:


"And we will all go together when we go.
Ev'ry Hottentot and ev'ry Eskimo.
When the air becomes uranious, we will all go simultaneous
Yes we all will go together, when we all go together
Yes, we all will go together when we go!"

Goodnight.

Cheers Clive. Entertainment, education and infuriating bafflement in roughly equal measures.

Thank you very much.

We aim to please.

I do hope everyone enjoyed it equally.

And congratulations in turn HD, if I recall correctly, you wandered into one of my elephant traps before and lost some points over it. With +5 in the bag from this thread you return from the negative numbers to a positively neutral "0" on the scoreboard.

Yes, storming ahead to zero points. As Jean Baudrillard so deftly put it: There ain't no stopping me now. Pal.

Taff would kill for zero points.

Look to it as an ambition to beat next year.

I must admit I've not checked my scores lately, I tend to prefer to live in blissful ignorance of how badly I'm doing

I've not scored a lot of threads yet

Oh no, I'm sure I'll not have gained a damn thing from yours Mala, you're far too good for me

I think I do owe you a few points...

WOW!

Really?