Edward Creutz

Edward Creutz (January 23, 1913 – June 27, 2009) was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.

After the war he became a professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

Creutz was born on January 23, 1913, in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, the son of Lester Creutz, a high school history teacher, and Grace Smith Creutz, a general science teacher.

He had two older brothers, John and Jim, and a younger sister, Edith.

The family moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in 1916, Monroe, Wisconsin, in 1920, and to Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1927.

He played a number of musical instruments, including the mandolin, ukulele and trombone.

He played in the school bands at Janesville High School and Monroe High School.

At Janesville he played tenor banjo in a dance orchestra called Rosie's Ragadors, and timpani with the school orchestra at Monroe.

He also played left guard on the American football teams at Janesville and Monroe.

He expressed an interest in chemistry, biology, geology and photography.

After graduating from Janesville High School in 1929, he took a job as a bookkeeper at a local bank.

In 1932, his brother John, who had graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a degree in electrical engineering, persuaded him to go to college as well.

John suggested that "if you aren’t sure what part of science you want, take physics, because that's basic to all of them."

Creutz later recalled that this was the best advice he ever got.

He entered the University of Wisconsin and studied mathematics and physics.

Money was scarce during the Great Depression, especially after his father died in 1935.

To pay his bills, Creutz worked as a dishwasher and short order cook, and took a job taking care of the physics laboratory equipment.

In 1936, his senior year, he taught physics laboratory classes.

Creutz encountered several members of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, including Julian Mack, Ragnar Rollefson, Raymond Herb, Eugene Wigner and Gregory Breit.

Mack gave Creutz a research project to do in his junior year.

Creutz remained at Wisconsin as a graduate student after receiving his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in 1936, working for Herb upgrading the departmental Van de Graaff generator from 300 to 600 keV.

With this done, the question became what to do with it, and Breit suggested that it had previously been observed that high-energy gamma rays were produced when lithium was bombarded with protons at 440 keV.

Creutz married Lela Rollefson, a mathematics student at Wisconsin, and the sister of Ragnar Rollefson, on September 13, 1937.

The couple had three children, two sons, Michael and Carl, and a daughter, Ann Jo.

Wigner moved to Princeton University in 1938, and soon after Creutz received an offer as well.

Princeton had been given a 36 in magnet by the University of California, which had been used to build an 8 MeV cyclotron.

They wanted Creutz to help get it operational.

He later recalled:

Creutz therefore wrote his 1939 Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) thesis on Resonance Scattering of Protons by Lithium, under Breit's supervision.

In October 1944, he moved to the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he became a group leader.

After the war ended, Creutz accepted an offer to come to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he became the head of its physics department and its nuclear research center in 1948.

He was Vice President of Research at General Atomics from 1955 to 1970.

He published over 65 papers on botany, physics, mathematics, metallurgy and science policy, and held 18 patents relating to nuclear energy.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Creutz helped Princeton University build its first cyclotron.

During World War II he worked on nuclear reactor design under Eugene Wigner at the Metallurgical Laboratory, designing the cooling system for the first water-cooled reactors.

He led a group that studied the metallurgy of uranium and other elements used in reactor designs.

In 1955 he returned to Los Alamos to evaluate its thermonuclear fusion program for the Atomic Energy Commission.

While there he accepted an offer to become vice president for research and development and the director of its John Jay Hopkins Laboratory for Pure and Applied Science at General Atomics.

Under his leadership, General Atomics developed TRIGA, a nuclear reactor for universities and laboratories.

Creutz served as an assistant director of the National Science Foundation from 1970 to 1977, and then as director of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, where he took particular interest in the museum's preparation of a Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawaii.