17 Facts About Marshall Holloway

Marshall Glecker Holloway was an American physicist who worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory during and after World War II.

Marshall Holloway was its representative, and the deputy scientific director, at the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in July 1946.

Marshall Glecker Holloway was born in Oklahoma, on November 23,1912, but his family moved to Florida when he was young.

Marshall Holloway graduated from Haines City High School, and entered the University of Florida, which awarded him a Bachelor of Science in education in 1933, and a Master of Science degree in physics in 1935.

Marshall Holloway went on to Cornell University, where he wrote his Doctor of Philosophy thesis on the Range and Specific Ionization of Alpha Particles.

Marshall Holloway married Wilma Schamel, who worked in the Medical Office at Cornell as a medical technologist, on August 22,1938.

In 1942, Marshall Holloway arrived at Purdue University on a secret assignment from the Manhattan Project.

The fusion cross section calculations were finished by September 1943, and the Purdue group moved to the Los Alamos Laboratory, where most of them, including Marshall Holloway, worked on the Water Boiler, an aqueous homogeneous reactor that was intended for use as a laboratory instrument to test critical mass calculations and the effect of various tamper materials.

Marshall Holloway studied the safety of the Little Boy bomb, particularly what would happen if the active material became immersed in water.

Marshall Holloway was involved in experiments to measure the critical mass of plutonium.

Marshall Holloway was part of Robert Bacher's "pit team" that assembled the Gadget for the Trinity nuclear test, and he helped Bacher fabricate the plutonium hemispheres of the Nagasaki Fat Man bomb.

Marshall Holloway remained at Los Alamos after the war ended in 1945.

Marshall Holloway was its representative, and the deputy scientific director, at the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in July 1946, when atomic bombs were tested against an array of warships.

Marshall Holloway became the head of the Laboratory's W Division, responsible for new weapons development.

Marshall Holloway's appointment was therefore "like waving a red flag in front of a bull".

In 1955, Marshall Holloway left the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked on air defense projects.

Marshall Holloway was vice president of Budd Company from 1967 to 1969, when he retired to live in Jupiter, Florida, Holloway and his wife Harriet subsequently moved to Winter Haven, Florida, where his son Jerry, a retired United States Air Force officer, lived.