Marshall Holloway

Marshall Holloway
Marshall G. Holloway
Born	(1912-11-23)November 23, 1912 Oklahoma
Died	June 18, 1991(1991-06-18) (aged 78) Winter Haven, Florida
Citizenship	American
Fields	Nuclear physics
Institutions	Los Alamos National Laboratory MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Alma mater	University of Florida Cornell University
Thesis	Range and Specific Ionization of Alpha Particles (1938)
Known for	Hydrogen bomb

Marshall Glecker Holloway (November 23, 1912 – June 18, 1991) was an American physicist who worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory during and after World War II. He was its representative, and the deputy scientific director, at the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in July 1946. Holloway became the head of the Laboratory's W Division, responsible for new weapons development. In September 1952 he was charged with designing, building and testing a thermonuclear weapon, popularly known as a hydrogen bomb. This culminated in the Ivy Mike test in November of that year.

Marshall Glecker Holloway was born in Oklahoma, on November 23, 1912, but his family moved to Florida when he was young. He 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. He went on to Cornell University, where he wrote his Doctor of Philosophy thesis on the Range and Specific Ionization of Alpha Particles.

Holloway married Wilma Schamel, who worked in the Medical Office at Cornell as a medical technologist, on August 22, 1938. During a picnic at Taughannock Falls on June 3, 1940, she and a graduate student, Henry S. Birnbaum, drowned while trying to rescue two women in the water. The women were subsequently rescued by Jean Doe Bacher, the wife of physicist Robert Bacher, and Helen Hecht, a graduate student, but the bodies of Wilma and Birnbaum had to be retrieved with grappling hooks two days later.

In 1942, Holloway arrived at Purdue University on a secret assignment from the Manhattan Project. His task was to modify the cyclotron there to help the group there, which included L.D. P. King and Raemer Schreiber and some graduate students, measure the cross section of the fusion of a deuterium nucleus, when bombarded with a tritium nucleus to form a 4
2He nucleus (alpha particle), and the cross section of a deuterium-tritium interaction to form 3
2He. These calculations were for evaluating the feasibility of Edward Teller's thermonuclear "Super bomb", and the resulting reports would remain classified for many years.