Oral History of Dr. John M. Blocher, Jr

ORAL HISTORY OF DR. JOHN M. BLOCHER, JR.

Interviewed by Keith McDaniel

December 28, 2016

21

MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is December the 28th, 2016. I am at the New Hope Center at Y-12, and today my oral history interview guest is Dr. John Blocher. Dr. Blocher, thank you for coming in today and for coming over.
DR. BLOCHER: You're sure welcome.
MR. MCDANIEL: This oral history is about you. I know you have a long history. First of all, how old are you?
DR. BLOCHER: I'll be 98 in a few days.
MR. MCDANIEL: In a few days, is it? Right.
DR. BLOCHER: January 6th.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, all right, good. Let's start at the beginning. This is when I'd like to start. Tell me where you were born and raised, something about your family.
DR. BLOCHER: I was born in Baltimore, Maryland. But my family lived in Berea, Ohio, near Cleveland, the site of Baldwin Wallace College, where my dad had just gone as a fresh professor just out of graduate school, to take a teaching job at Baldwin Wallace College. I went to Baltimore in protective custody. The family lived in Berea for a few months at least. We wanted to go back to Baltimore to take advantage of my mother's hospitalization, and stayed there over Christmas and through the birth, and in a couple of months went back to Berea. I figure Berea's my hometown.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Is that where you grew up?
DR. BLOCHER: That's where I grew up. I went to Berea High School, went to Baldwin Wallace College because I got free tuition.
MR. MCDANIEL: What did you say your father taught there?
DR. BLOCHER: Chemistry.
MR. MCDANIEL: Chemistry, okay.
DR. BLOCHER: He was my chemistry teacher.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Good. Did you have brothers or sisters?
DR. BLOCHER: I had one sister. She died in about 2010.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Okay. You went to Berea High School there.
DR. BLOCHER: Berea High School, and then on to Baldwin Wallace.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you know? Is that what you were interested in in high school, science, chemistry?
DR. BLOCHER: I was interested in bugs and chemistry and physics and radio and all those things. We played baseball in the evenings, if that's something.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
DR. BLOCHER: That's the extent of my activity.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you remember what year you graduated high school?
DR. BLOCHER: 1936.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1936.
DR. BLOCHER: There are only a few of us left, but we're hanging in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, that is true. You were in high school and college during the Depression.
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about that.
DR. BLOCHER: In fact, my dad ... I wasn't in college, but during the Depression, the college couldn't pay his salary. He was the city chemist of Berea, Ohio, and took care of the water supply monitoring, and they couldn't pay him either. So they had a script system where they issued script and you traded script for groceries and so on and so forth. We knew what the Depression was.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet. He didn't get paid, but he got something there.
DR. BLOCHER: He got subsistence, and I don't remember them complaining. They went along with it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I guess that eventually went away, as the Depression was over.
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah, that was over.
MR. MCDANIEL: In college, what was your major?
DR. BLOCHER: My major was chemistry, and actually, I had a minor in math.

MR. MCDANIEL: When you graduated college, what did you do next?
DR. BLOCHER: I went to Ohio State to work on a PhD.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, all right. You got your PhD there?
DR. BLOCHER: I didn't get it at that time. I worked on it for about two and a half years. My preceptor said, "John, they're building a plant down in Tennessee. They need staffing in the area that you've been studying." He said, "Looks like you could either be drafted into the Army Special Engineer Detachment or volunteer with the civilian manager, the personnel at Y-12 in Oak Ridge." That's how it started.
MR. MCDANIEL: That wasn't much of a choice, was it? Be drafted or go to work.
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah. We had a lot of the Special Engineer Detachments working for us, working with us actually, but their accommodations did not suit a wife and two children, so I took the housing. In fact, I saved a lot of money by taking, what are they called the cracker box houses out on the hillside rather than an apartment or a house in downtown in the Town Site area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. What year did you come to Oak Ridge?
DR. BLOCHER: I came in May of 1944.
MR. MCDANIEL: ‘44.
DR. BLOCHER: ‘44, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: You came in May of ‘44. You said, were you married and had kids at that time?
DR. BLOCHER: I was married with two children, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: With two children, okay, all right. When you came to Oak Ridge, did you know what the project was? What did they tell you?
DR. BLOCHER: I figured they were separating uranium isotopes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, just based upon your knowledge?
DR. BLOCHER: We knew that the Germans had discovered fission.
MR. MCDANIEL: Fission, right.
DR. BLOCHER: In the early 1930’s. When I realized that that's what they were doing down here, what I suspected they were doing down here, (what I suspected they were doing down here,) I jumped at the chance to get in and beat the Germans to the solution. I have a German heritage. My seven times great-grandfather came over from Germany in 1753, settled in Pennsylvania. My family grew up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. They had a farm on the border of the battlefield, and the name Blocher Farm appears on the big Batchelder map in the northeast corner of the map.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
DR. BLOCHER: Got a lot of history.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, absolutely. Tell me, what was your impression of Oak Ridge when you first came? Tell me what it was like.
DR. BLOCHER: It was primitive but adequate. The Town Site was built up. There were grocery stores and so on and so forth. We had our cracker box house, 226 Wadsworth Place.
MR. MCDANIEL: Place?
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Place, okay.
DR. BLOCHER: It was off of Wadsworth Circle. The buses ran night and day, grinding up and down hills. The wood was delivered to the potbelly stove that heated the place. Was it wood or coal?
MR. MCDANIEL: It was coal.
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah, I guess it was coal.
MR. MCDANIEL: Coal was delivered.
DR. BLOCHER: Sure it was. Yeah, I remember now. We were well taken care of. It was primitive but adequate.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Was it an A house? Do you remember what it was?
DR. BLOCHER: The C’s on…
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, there are A, B, C’s, and they use them.
DR. BLOCHER: Anyway, it had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom.
MR. MCDANIEL: I don't know. It may have been a B, but there were several different versions. You came and you went to work at Y-12. Is that correct?
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: What did you do there?
DR. BLOCHER: I was in a group that maintained the Nier mass spectrometers in Building 9203 that were used for analytical measurement of the degree of enrichment of the samples that came from the production units. I just kept them going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? Okay.
DR. BLOCHER: They were temperamental, breakdowns all the time at the start. Toward the end of my time there, just before the war, they were pretty reliable. I got to supervise a shift of girls that were doing the analytical work, watching the galvanometers swing back and forth.
MR. MCDANIEL: What you all did is you tested the product that was being produced, the uranium. Is that correct?
DR. BLOCHER: We analyzed the degree of enrichment of the samples that came from the main production line, yeah, and then reported the results back, and that gave them the data that they needed for planning the future production runs. We figured that it was a vital step in the process.
MR. MCDANIEL: I would think so. Absolutely it was. Who did you work with? Who was your supervisor?
DR. BLOCHER: He was Gus Cameron. I hope you've heard that name before, because he was a great guy. Came from the University of Rochester and Tennessee Eastman. Tennessee Eastman's a company. I'm not sure for the connections there, but anyway…
MR. MCDANIEL: Tennessee Eastman was a contractor. They were running several.
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah, that's right. His associates were Roger Hibbs. Now you've heard that name?
MR. MCDANIEL: Absolutely.
DR. BLOCHER: Roger Hibbs was in our group. He was more general. He was Gus Cameron's right-hand man, and he was a smart cookie, as you well know.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm not sure. I think he may have gone on to be the plant manager.
DR. BLOCHER: He was the plant manager. He was the president of the whole shebang at one point.
MR. MCDANIEL: At one point, he certainly was.
DR. BLOCHER: Unfortunately, when I got in contact with him three or four years ago, he had mental problems and he didn't remember a thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
DR. BLOCHER: Sorry about that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
DR. BLOCHER: He was such a great guy. Gus Cameron, Roger Hibbs, Glenn ... I've got mental problems.
MR. MCDANIEL: Listen, there's nothing wrong with forgetting names.
DR. BLOCHER: What I'd like to find out, if you have cross-references in your interviews, is how many of those guys are still living. Some of them I've forgotten the names, but if I saw them I would recognize them, and I'd like to get in contact with them if they are still in the picture.
MR. MCDANIEL: We'll see what we can do about that, absolutely. How long did you work there?
DR. BLOCHER: I worked from May of ‘44 through the dropping of the bomb on August 6th of ‘45, then I talked to the personnel manager. I said, "I would like to go back to Ohio State, finish up my degree." He said, "John, don't, whatever you do, retire at that point, separation." He says, "Let me fire you. That way I can give you a separation package," and that was enough to pay for my last year in graduate school practically. That was a good deal.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, that was a good deal, absolutely.
DR. BLOCHER: We went right back to graduate school and finished up there. I applied for a couple of jobs after the PhD. One was DuPont, got accepted there, but housing was hard to come by at that time. I had a wife and two kids, and a place to live in Columbus, and an offer ... I applied also at Battelle Memorial Institute, which was a research organization across the street from Ohio State University. It was an easy transition to walk across the street and start working there, and I worked there until I retired there in 1981.
MR. MCDANIEL: You worked there your entire career after you got your PhD.
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah. Battelle is essentially a research job shop. They've got a staff. I don't know what the number is now, but when I was there it was maybe 1,500, something like that. People in all fields of research. So if you got an idea, wrote a proposal, and convinced some whoever that they should or they could finance it, or be willing to finance it, you could pick your staff members, build up a team, and follow wherever it went. In a way, you could control your own destiny.
MR. MCDANIEL: As long as you were savvy enough to come up with something you thought they would fund it, right?
DR. BLOCHER: Yeah, you have to do that, too, and you also have to write proposals. I got tired of it. A reason for retiring early was I got tired of writing proposals and being congratulated as coming in second best of 30.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, I guess that would be disheartening.
DR. BLOCHER: More writing than doing research at that point.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, I understand.
DR. BLOCHER: I retired at 62 then.
MR. MCDANIEL: 62. We're going to get back to Oak Ridge in a little bit, but let me ask you about ... What'd you say, it's the Battelle Institute?
DR. BLOCHER: Battelle, B-A-T-T-E-L-L-E. It was established by a Gordon Battelle, who was a steel mogul, I'll say, convinced that through research you could advance the whole industry and all of industry, in fact. He had a very broad philosophy. He gave the family fortune, not a great fortune but enough to establish an institute. I don't know. I guess it was about a couple of tens of millions of dollars.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Battelle is contractor now. UT-Battelle.
DR. BLOCHER: That's right, they've branched out into managing a lot of things now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Absolutely. Did your work at Oak Ridge, did the fact that you worked at Oak Ridge, did that influence you being able to get a job there?
DR. BLOCHER: I don't think so. It's just the fact that I had background in ... Yeah, it was related obviously. It was good preparations in organic chemistry and required a lot of ingenuity and working with the problems here at Oak Ridge. Gus Cameron had an interesting project, where he wanted to have an analytical machine that one would connect to the mass spectrometer when it was in trouble without shutting it down, so they could diagnose problems on the fly. I worked with him for a while to design that thing and get it going. We didn't use it very much, because that was toward the end of the war.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did it work?
DR. BLOCHER: It worked on several occasions, but it vanished. The ingenuity required in designing that would impress Battelle, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly. Talk a little bit about a mass spectrometer, and what it is, and how big is it, and what does it do, and how many things you had.
DR. BLOCHER: I hope you've got one preserved here someplace.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure some place they do.
DR. BLOCHER: The mass spectrometer operates on the same principles as the calutron; the sample of volatilized material is hit with electrons to ionize whatever is evolved into an electrostatic field of some thousands of volts that accelerates the ions from the positive ion source to the negative target. You have to do this at very low pressures, starting with a vacuum, otherwise the excess particles scatter the ion beam. On their way to the target, the ions go through a strong perpendicular magnetic field to bend the beam. In the calutrons, that was a big power consumer of the big D’s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, the big D’s.
DR. BLOCHER: In that field, the string of ions is bent, goes in like-
MR. MCDANIEL: Curved.
DR. BLOCHER: Curved, and the lighter ions are bent into a tighter arc than the heavier ions. You could collect the U-235 on the inside and the 238 on the outside.
MR. MCDANIEL: Basically, it worked principally the same way that a calutron worked fundamentally, but what you were doing was about by doing this kind of work, you could tell how pure or how enriched the uranium samples were.
DR. BLOCHER: The only difference was the size of the thing and the fact that the ... We used a different feed material. We used uranium hexafluoride, which is more volatile, and fluorine has only one isotope which simplifies matters. Anyway, in the calutrons, they collected the material on targets. Whatever may have been the differences at the negative target or collector at the end, the mass spectrometer girls scanned their galvanometers back and forth over the peaks whose height indicated how much of each material was going through.