2018年4月5日 · "Calutron Girls" were young women hired to work at Y-12 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Many were just out of high school, and were tasked with monitoring the Calutron, which was the machine that separated enriched uranium isotopes.

The Calutron Girls were a group of young women—mostly high school graduates—who had joined the Manhattan Project at the Y-12 National Security Complex located at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, from 1943 to 1945.

The Calutron Girls separated uranium at Y-12 in Oak Ridge without knowing what they were working on. During the Manhattan Project, approximately 10,000 young women operated the arrays, or racetracks, at Oak Ridge's Y-12 Electromagnetic Isotope Separation Plant.

One of the most iconic photographs from the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, TN features two rows of women sitting in front of imposingly large machines covered with meters and dials. Taken by the legendary photographer Ed Westcott, this picture captures a typical day for the “Calutron Girls,” the women charged with the task of

2023年7月19日 · The majority of the Oak Ridge inhabitants were women who worked as janitors, mail censors, cooks, chemists, accountants, managers, and phone operators in machine shops and chemical processing plants. The women working at the plants producing uranium were known as “calutron girls.”

2024年4月22日 · The Calutron Girls were a group of mostly recent high school graduates employed to work on a secret task to aid the war efforts at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The women were taught how to operate machines called racetracks without ever being told the exact purpose of the machines.

Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City captures a wonderful social history of how women made the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee successful. As we celebrate women in World War II, it is a time to recognize their often overlooked contributions in our history.

2019年10月29日 · Working at the Y-12 uranium electromagnetic separation plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, women known as “Calutron Girls” played a critical role during the development of “Little Boy,” the first of two atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end World War II.

2022年6月24日 · One by one they stepped off trains and buses and entered the mysterious town of Oak Ridge, a sprawling complex along the Clinch River which had seemingly sprung up overnight and whose purpose was a closely-guarded secret.

I’m Katie and I’ve been living here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (the Secret City) since the 1940s. I worked on the Manhattan Project as one of Oak Ridge’s famous Calutron Girls back then, but now that the war is over, we’re ready to share our secrets with everyone.