Donald Hornig was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1920, was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry at the age of 23, in 1943, with a dissertation on 'An Investigation of the Shock Wave Produced by an Explosion in Air.'. He went to work at the explosives laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution right out of Harvard. Shortly after getting to W.H.O.I., he was offered a job but was not told what the job would entail or even where it would be located. Initially, he refused but was persuaded to rethink this decision after being told his country needed his particular skills. At which point, he joined the Manhattan District Engineers and went to work on designing the explosive 'lenses' for the plutonium bombs, 'The Gadget' and 'Fat Man'. He was present at the Trinity test in Nevada, when The Gadget was successfully tested and in fact had been sent up to the top of the tower the device was sitting on by a nervous J. Robert Oppenheimer to check on the device.... twice. Mr. Hornig would go on to have a very successful career, including being both President and Dean at Brown University, and later to chair the chemistry dept. of Princeton University.
When Mr. Hornig died in Providence, RI, on 21 January, 2013 at the age of 92, he was the last surviving witness of the Trinity test in 1945, the world's first atomic bomb.
But what may be more interesting is that when he went to Los Alamos, he was accompanied by the woman he had married that same year, Lilli Hornig, and she approached the personnel dept. of Los Alamos with the thought of gaining employment there. She was asked how many words per minute she could type, to which she answered that she could not type at all. But she did have a degree in chemistry and significant scientific skills in her own right and was eventually given a job working on plutonium chemistry. This was later changed and she worked on the explosive lenses used in the plutonium bombs. And this makes Mrs. Hornig one of a very small group; of the approx. 400 scientists working at the top levels of The Manhattan Project, only 10 were women. Mrs. Hornig went on to earn her own Ph.D. from Harvard in 1950, and then go on to become a chemistry professor at Brown, as well as the chairwoman of chemistry dept. of Trinity College. She would also go on to author three books: Climbing the Academic Ladder: Doctoral Women Scientists in Academe, Equal Rites, Unequal Outcomes: Women in American Research Universities, and Women Scientists in Industry and Government: How Much Progress in the 1970s. She would remain married to Donald Hornig for nearly 50 years until his death, and they would have four children together.
Not too shabby for a women who had escaped Berlin after the Nazis took control of that country in 1933.
Lilli Hornig died this past November 2017, the 21st, in Providence, RI, at the age of 96.
Brian
