"MET LAB" (METALLURGICAL LABORATORY)

Places

The Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) was one of the most important research facilities of the Manhattan Project. Using the name "Metallurgical Laboratory" as a cover, Arthur H. Compton in January 1942 chose his home campus of the University of Chicago as the central location where he would bring together much of the fission chain reaction research that up until that point had been scattered around the nation. As the first facility specifically established to develop the atomic bomb, the Met Lab was for a period of time the most important scientific center of the Manhattan Project. In its first year, the Met Lab focused on designing reactors (piles), separating plutonium, and proving a sustained, controlled nuclear chain reaction. On December 2, 1942, underneath the abandoned west stands of the university's Stagg Field football stadium, the world's first nuclear reactor, "Chicago Pile #1," known as "CP-1," achieved a sustained chain reaction. In the spring of 1943, CP-1 was reassembled as CP-2 at a site in the Argonne Forest about twenty-five miles southwest of Chicago. Another experimental reactor, CP-3, soon followed at what was now the Argonne Laboratory.

Life at the Met Lab was probably more normal than at the other major Manhattan Project sites. Situated on the University of Chicago campus, albeit essentially segregated, the Met Lab provided a setting that fundamentally was not that different from what researchers had enjoyed at their home universities. As emphasis shifted in 1943 from pile research to plutonium production and scientists transferred to the new laboratories at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, the Met Lab played an increasingly secondary role. Morale suffered as the Met Lab and the Argonne Laboratory were reduced to supporting operations at Hanford, helping Los Alamos, and conducting limited research. Manhattan Project officials nonetheless recognized the postwar need for nuclear scientists and research laboratories. In early 1946, an Advisory Committee on Research and Development appointed by General Leslie Groves recommended that national laboratories be established for the primary purpose of pursuing unclassified fundamental research that required equipment too expensive for a university or private laboratory. On July 1, 1946, the Argonne National Laboratory became the nation's first national laboratory.

To continue with a quick overview of the Places of the Manhattan Project, jump ahead to the description of Oak Ridge. To learn more about the Met Lab, choose a web page from the menu below:

Sources and notes for this page

The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources. Major sources consulted include the following: Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946: Volume I, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972); Arthur M. Compton, Atomic Quest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); and Manhattan District History, Book IV - Pile Project, Volume 2 - Research, Part I - Metallurgical Laboratory. The portrait of Compton is courtesy of the Department of Energy. The data printout is reproduced from Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, between pages 112 and 113.