History: William Taylor Miller

[Mike Grissom <mikeg@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

Radsafers,

Another former Manhattan Project person has died.
This is from the November 28, 1998 edition of the
San Jose Mercury News "Deaths Elsewhere" section.

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MILLER, William Taylor, 87,

an organic chemist and expert in fluorine chemistry
who worked on the team that built the atomic bomb
in World War II; November 15 at Cayuga Medical Center
in Ithaca, New York. Mr. Miller spent 41 years on the
faculty of Cornell University, where he was a professor
of chemistry from 1947 to 1977. A native of
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he graduated from Duke
University and received a doctorate in organic
chemistry there in 1935 before joining the Cornell
faculty as an instructor the next year. His early
research in organofluorine chemistry led to his
recruitment for the Manhattan Project. The task was to
create materials, like lubricants or pump oil, that
would not react with highly corrosive uranium gas. His
team developed novel polymers that made possible the
separation of the fissionable isotope uranium-235.

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