Inside Allis Chalmers: The Shop That Built The Manhattan Project's Uranium Pumps

In 1943 the fastest any company could build a large centrifugal blower was about 1 a week. The Army needed 30 a day for K-25, the uranium plant at Oak Ridge, and the seal for the shaft hadn't been invented. British scientists said nobody could turn out that many before 1947. This documentary follows the job from the benches in Milwaukee to the pump shop in Tennessee, using the Manhattan District's own history and the men who ran it. the Reliance Works, the West Allis unit plan, and a 1906 turbine that ran a month with a jackknife inside it Ann Rosener's 1942 photographs of the supercharger plant, where women gauged parts, ran drill presses and finished impellers winding Y-12's magnet coils with Treasury silver, and the 80 coils that came back to be unwound and rebuilt Ingersoll-Rand withdraws and Allis-Chalmers takes a pump job with no finished design what the pump had to do, from zero inleakage to a compression ratio extremely high for a centrifugal pump the Hawley Plant, tooled up on frozen ground in 1943, and the 300 machinists moved from the main works in 1944 the welded monel impeller, the nickel-clad scroll and the triple-disc seal the test stand loop, the order to ship every pump, and 40 a day conditioning in fluorine, the No. 80 drill leak standard and over 1 million vacuum tests impellers rubbing their casings, 1,996 pumps pulled for re-machining, and 2,000 seals changed to tool steel a cascade that ran at about 98 percent, and what Christopher Hinton told Kenneth Nichols in 1949 Subscribe to Trade Archive for more stories about the machines, shops and people behind the trades:    / @tradearchive   Sources Bruce, William George. History of Milwaukee, City and County. Vol. 3. Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1922. Encyclopedia of Milwaukee. "Allis-Chalmers Corporation." University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Engineering (London). Report on the Kent Avenue turbo-generator, 1 June 1906. Via Grace's Guide to British Industrial History. Hewlett, Richard G., and Oscar E. Anderson Jr. The New World, 1939–1946. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962. Hobbs, James C. Interview by Stephane Groueff, January 19, 1965. Voices of the Manhattan Project, Atomic Heritage Foundation. Hoppin, Albert. "Edward P. Allis and His Life Work." Magazine of Western History, November 1887. Library of Congress. Office of War Information photographs by Ann Rosener, Milwaukee supercharger plant, October 1942. Manhattan District History. Book I, Vol. 9, Priorities Program; Book II, Vols. 1–5, Gaseous Diffusion (K-25) Project; Book V, Vols. 4–5, Electromagnetic Project. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, c. 1947. Marshall, James C. Interview by Stephane Groueff, November 4, 1965. Voices of the Manhattan Project, Atomic Heritage Foundation. Nichols, Kenneth. Interview by Stephane Groueff, January 5, 1965. Voices of the Manhattan Project, Atomic Heritage Foundation. Squires, Arthur. Interview by Stephane Groueff, December 3, 1964. Voices of the Manhattan Project, Atomic Heritage Foundation. Stowers, James C. Interview by Stephane Groueff, March 3, 1965. Voices of the Manhattan Project, Atomic Heritage Foundation. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Strikes in 1941 and Strikes Affecting Defense Production. Bulletin 711. Washington, DC, 1942. U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information. "K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant" and "Y-12 Silver Program." The Manhattan Project: An Interactive History.