Theodore Rockwell’s Interview (2002)

Ted Rockwell arrived in Oak Ridge in 1943 after graduating from Princeton with a degree in engineering. After three months, Rockwell joined the “Process Improvement Team“, a group of engineers tasked with monitoring and fixing problems at various plants across the site. Rockwell recalls life at Oak Ridge, describing the secret city as “a tremendous sociological experiment“ where “kids who had never used any indoor plumbing and sons of Nobel laureates all went to school together.“ After the war, Rockwell worked with Captain Hyman Rickover to help develop the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. For the interview transcript: