August Clarence Klein was born on April 01, 1887 in Jersey City, New Jersey, United States, the eldest of four children (two sons and two daughters) of August Klein and Lillian (Gavenisch) Klein. Both his parents were of German ancestry. His father was head of the cigarette department of Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company.
Klein attended public schools, entered Stevens Institute of Technology in 1904 and graduated in 1908 with the degree of mechanical engineer. In 1947, in recognition of his work on the atomic bomb project, Stevens Institute of Technology awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science Degree.
Klein worked as a gas engineer for the United Gas Improvement Company in Philadelphia until American entry into World War I, when he became a first lieutenant in the Army Ordnance Department, assigned to the production of toluol and nitrates. On April 1, 1920, he joined Stone and Webster Engineering Corporation in Boston as a gas engineer in its industrial division. When that division was absorbed by the mechanical division, Klein went along as a mechanical engineer. In the course of time, his work on the design of steam power plants and chemical plants, his authoritative knowledge of depreciation and public utility rates, and his ability to make quick, correct decisions led to his promotion to chief mechanical engineer in 1929.
After the outbreak of World War II, the Army Corps of Engineers turned to Stone and Webster for a number of projects, most of them carried out under Klein's direction. When the War Department called for a rapid increase in explosives-manufacturing capacity, Klein suggested that the Du Pont Company provide technical guidelines and designs and that Stone and Webster, along with other engineer-contractors, undertake construction. Klein himself speeded the program by designing a standard power plant and stockpiling basic components. Under Klein's direction three huge plants were built in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. The Illinois plant, largest of the three, began manufacturing TNT only ten months after groundbreaking.
In June 1942 the task of producing fissionable material for an atomic bomb was assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers. Its deputy chief of construction, Colonel Leslie R. Groves, recommended Stone and Webster as the engineering firm best suited to the job. As Groves summed up his arguments in retrospect, "They were accustomed to working with scientific people--far more than most engineering firms; they were a large firm, capable in both engineering and construction; and they were performing well on all their contracts with the Corps of Engineers". In July 1942 Stone and Webster began work on Project X, later to become the Manhattan Project under General Groves. In Boston, under the direction of Klein as project engineer, the group of design engineers and draftsmen eventually grew to about 800, and other groups were formed elsewhere under Klein's authority. An evidence of Klein's commitment to the project was his insistence from the start on the need for maximum production and year-round operation of the Canadian uranium mining operation at Great Bear Lake near the Arctic Circle.
He supervised the engineering design in the building of the first uranium pile facilities in the Argonne Forest Laboratory at the University of Chicago and the heavy-water plant at Trail, British Columbia. Three ways of obtaining fissionable material seemed most promising: production of the new element plutonium in uranium-graphite piles and separation of the fissionable uranium isotope U235 from the more common U238 either by gaseous diffusion or by electromagnetism. In July 1942 Klein visited the Berkeley radiation laboratory of Ernest O. Lawrence and caught its enthusiasm for electromagnetic separation. Klein correctly forecast that the electromagnetic method would ultimately be superseded by one of the others but that meanwhile it would yield the quickest results for wartime use; he therefore urged the authorities to push forward at once toward production.
In the fall of 1942, however, it was decided to develop all three approaches concurrently. It was soon apparent that no one firm could handle all of these on the enormous scale projected. Stone and Webster had been granted the contract for all the engineering work for the Manhattan Project, and Klein had already begun organizing design work for the electromagnetic separation plant. Since, in any case, Stone and Webster's forte was electrical engineering design and construction, all concerned agreed that the firm should continue with that project, leaving the essentially chemical plutonium project to Du Pont and the gaseous diffusion project to the M. W. Kellogg Company, an engineering firm with special expertise in petroleum refineries. Klein also participated in choosing the Knoxville area for the U235 project, and his group in Boston designed the new town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as well as the electromagnetic plant, both of which were constructed by Stone and Webster. By the summer of 1943 the firm had about 25, 000 men at work in Tennessee.
Klein dispatched engineers to work with the scientists at Berkeley and Chicago, with manufacturers, and with others involved in the complex undertaking. Frequently on the move, visiting Washington and job sites, he was adept at catching brief naps in airports and arriving at a destination refreshed. At his headquarters in Boston, he held daily meetings at 12:30 (so that lunch-time hunger would curb longwindedness) with from twelve to twenty leaders of the engineering design group. At about one o'clock, after having led the discussion with genial adroitness, he would summarize what had been said and make the necessary decisions promptly and emphatically.
The group faced unprecedented problems. Time did not even permit a pilot plant. Construction of the enormous full-scale plant had to go on simultaneously with research on the process. New findings kept requiring complicated alterations of existing designs. Nevertheless, Klein exuded confidence. His decisions were usually right but not, of course, invariably so, and to some of his more cautious colleagues, he seemed unsettlingly flamboyant and unpredictable. But he kept the thousands of design drawings coming to the field forces. However credit may be apportioned on this vast project, "Gus" Klein (as he was always called) came as close as any other man to embodying the spirit and power of that climactic engineering enterprise, desperately harried yet boldly confident, prodigal yet productive, multifarious in activity yet masterful in organization and clear in purpose.
After the war, in 1945 he became engineering manager for Stone and Webster and a year later was elected vice-president. In 1948, while vacationing at Montego Bay, Jamaica, he died of coronary thrombosis after a golf game. His manner of passing was characteristic. He lay down to rest; suddenly exclaimed, "This is all nonsense"; sprang to his feet; and fell back dead. He was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
August Clarence Klein was recognized for his work on the Manhattan Project, a research and development undertaking during World War II to produce an atomic bomb. He was responsible for the construction of huge power plants in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee and for the design of heavy-water plant at Trail, British Columbia.
Klein was a dynamic, ebullient man. His visits to the field were marked by all-night poker games, and he was also a vigorous and accomplished pianist. Although heavy demands were made on his time, he maintained a warm, lively family life, full of outdoor activities, at his Newton Center home.
In September 1919, Klein married Maree Stone Keeling. They had one daughter, Maree L. , and four sons, James H. , Frederick W. , August S. , and John D.
