Alvin Cushman Graves was an American nuclear physicist.
Background
Graves was born on November 4, 1909, in Washington, D. C. , the son of Herbert Cornelius Graves, chief of the Division of Hydrography and Topography in the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and of Clara Edith Walter, a teacher at the Spencerian Business College in Washington. His father died when Graves was ten, and his mother took a job with the Bureau of the Census. He went to live with an aunt and uncle in Washington Grove, Maryland.
Education
In 1924 Graves returned to Washington and completed high school. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Virginia (1927-1931), then did graduate work in engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1932) and in physics at the University of Chicago (1935-1939), where he received the Ph. D.
Career
In 1939, Graves became an instructor in physics at the University of Texas, where he started a program of cosmic ray research. He was joined in this work by his wife. In 1941 he was promoted to assistant professor, and the following year to associate professor. Soon after the United States entered World War II, Graves was asked by Professor Arthur Compton to return to Chicago, to work on the development of nuclear reactors for the production of plutonium. At Chicago he participated in the work that demonstrated the feasibility of a nuclear-fission chain reaction. Then he worked with the small group of scientists who built the first nuclear reactor, located under the football stands on the Chicago campus. At the time the reactor first went critical, Graves and two others were standing on top of it with bottles of cadmium sulfate to pour into the reactor if the controls failed. Fortunately they worked perfectly. After the demonstration that a nuclear reactor could be built and controlled, Graves worked on the design and construction of the nuclear weapons that would be made from the reactor-produced plutonium rather than on the engineering and construction of the production reactors. In April 1943 he and his wife arrived in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he worked first on nuclear physics measurements necessary for design of the bomb, then on properties of metals at very high temperature and pressure that were required for the design. At the first nuclear weapon test in July 1945, the Graveses measured the effects of the explosion. In 1946 Graves was observing a demonstration of the assembly of fissionable material when the assembly accidentally became supercritical. One participant was killed by nuclear radiation, and Graves received a very large exposure. After a serious illness he returned to work with nuclear weapons. In 1948 he was deputy scientific director for the first weapons test series conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Following the 1948 test series and until his death Graves was chief scientist on nearly every nuclear weapons test conducted by the United States. During this time he was also head of the nuclear weapons testing division of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and influential in the technical direction of the laboratory. His specific responsibilities included, in addition to nuclear weapons testing, the testing of reactors for nuclear rocket propulsion and detection of foreign weapons tests. He also headed such research activities as solar eclipse expeditions and radiochemical research that led to discovery of new transuranic elements. Graves served on advisory panels to government agencies, including the Committee of Senior Reviewers of the AEC and the Army Science Advisory Panel. He died at Del Norte, Colorado, on July 19, 1965.
Achievements
Connections
Graves married Elizabeth Boykin Riddle, a graduate student in physics at the University of Chicago, on September 27, 1937; they had three children. His wife received the Ph. D. in 1940.