“It became very interesting to me that my work would somehow help the war effort”

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

She kept it under her hat for years, but now, the University of Tennessee’s first statistics graduate discusses how she did her part for the U.S. war effort in the 1940s, including her work with the top-secret Manhattan Project.

How’s this for a job description? Manage the compilation of data obtained from a mass spectrometer used to separate uranium-235 from natural uranium and use the appropriate equations to calculate the percentage of uranium-235 obtained. Oh, and this is top-secret, by the way.

Kind of different from your 9 to 5, perhaps?

But that’s just what Jane Greer Puckett did every day when she launched her career in the 1940s at the Y-12 laboratories in Oak Ridge as part of the legendary Manhattan Project.

Full article by Roger Hagy, Jr. continues at the UT Torchbearer site.

More articles on the Manhattan Project:

Road Trip to the Secret City(Opens in a new browser tab)

He removed his eyeglasses and lit the pipe by focusing light through the glasses(Opens in a new browser tab)

Wheat, TN disappears at the hands of the Manhattan Project(Opens in a new browser tab)