Talk:Godiva device

Name

Why was it called the Godiva device? I mean the Godiva bit, not the device bit. 86.133.214.216 (talk) 19:19, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

I presume the device was named Lady Godiva because it was a bare mass of fissile material (Uranium 235), with no cladding. Pages 78 to 83 of the referenced la-13638.pdf document cover some of the history, including that of the 1952 Jemima device that preceeded Lady Godiva. -Wikianon (talk) 19:55, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

It got its name from Otto Frisch - he called it 'Lady Godiva' because it was unshielded and naked, like the original. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.40.254.8 (talk) 18:29, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I think that fotograph on this page displays not Godiva, but Jemima device. This is due to description on page, which applies much more to Jemima. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.100.65.179 (talk) 10:59, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

This whole article needs to be changed and I don't know where to begin. Read Frisch's book, What Little I Remember. What is described here (the dropping of a piece of U-235 through a hole) is not the Godiva Device, but the "Dragon Experiment". The Lady Godiva assembly involved the stacking of bars of uranium hydride. Frisch indeed had a dangerous incident with this but it was in 1944, not 1954. I don't know what the Jemima device was, but given the preceding incident, Godiva couldn't have been invented after Jemima in 1952. These are just the things wrong that I know about. There may be others; an expert's attention is requested.HowardJWilk (talk) 20:49, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the 1954 date is strange, I will now look for the Diana Preston book used as cite - maybe this was a typo. Meanwhile, the paragraph mentioning Jemima appears to cite the los Alamos document - I added this quote from page 78 to the reference: "apparent self terminating property of this excursion stimulated study with Lady Godiva,46,47,48". Page 78 starts with "4. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, 18 April 1952" and then "Jemima, cylindrical, unreflected 235 U metal assembly; excursion history unknown; insignificant exposures." The word "Jemima" appears two more times in that document: "accident was, in many respects, similar to that of Jemima (II-B.4)" on page 83; and "similar to those of the Jemima (II-B.4) accident" on page 84. My guess is that "II-B 4." refers to "Table 11. Reactor and Critical Experiment Accidents" on page 68, where entry 4 has "18-04-52 Los Alamos, NM 92.4 kg U(93) metal Cylinder, unreflected". I'll dig around to see what I can find. 84user (talk) 22:16, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Footnotes 46, 47 and 48 from the Los-Alamos document are as follows:

46.Peterson, R.E., and G.A.Newby. “An Unreflected U-235 Critical Assembly.” Nucl.Sci.Eng. 1, 112–125, (1956).

47.Wimett, T.F., L.B.Engle, G.A.Graves, G.R.Keepin, Jr., and J.D.Orndoff. Time Behavior of Godiva Through Prompt Critical. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, LA-2029, (1956).

48.Paxton, H.C. “Godiva, Topsy, Jezebel—Critical Assemblies at Los Alamos.” Nucleonics 13, Oct., 48–50, (1955). -84user (talk) 23:28, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I tried to verify the sentences mentioning Frisch from the Preston book but Google books only permits a very limited snippet search. It yields zero matches for the words "Jemima" or "Godiva"; "hesitated" only appears once on page 15 about Marie Curie; the phrase "glowing continuously" appears once on page 409 referring to page 278 with a highly elided note "glowing continuously ... reflected ... critical ... the reaction ... second ... if I ... been fatal':Frisch, What Little I Remember, pp.161-2.". Searches for other words yielded results that were truncated before page 278.

Now, this edit introduced the Frisch text and that had "1944". An anonymous editor changed it to 1954 here, that was a mistake I feel.

A Google Books search for "What Little I Remember godiva" returns a good preview of Frisch's book: inside section "Los Alamos 1943-1945: 1", page 161 has "we called it the Lady Godiva assembly". Page 161 supports the Frisch paragraph once 1954 is corrected to 1944, which I will do now. -84user (talk) 23:28, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Updates done, with these four edits I have updated the cites and merged the duplicate and probably confusing Frisch paragraph to Otto Robert Frisch, interested editors please review. -84user (talk) 01:00, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

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