Over the last three years the Society for the Preservation of Canada’s Nuclear Heritage Inc. (SPCNHI) has received several large donations of documents from the estates of Canadian nuclear pioneers. Many of these donations have contained important records of the development of the industry and its technologies …and sometimes they also contain fascinating glimpses into the curious scientific mind delving into more down-to-earth situations.
Recently the Society received a very large collection of books along with a cache of documents (more than 20 “banker’s boxes”) from the home of Graham Lee-Whiting. Graham was a theoretical physicist, who it appears threw nothing out. Jim Ungrin, as a retired physicist and the Society’s Artifacts Chair, has been tasked with sorting through the material to determine what should be retained and catalogued in the Society records.
Over Graham’s long career at Chalk River, he had a wide range of interests and did many erudite calculations on such arcane subjects as the mass of neutrinos, the design of world-class beta spectrometers, the design of accelerator magnets and cavities, and the beam optics of the superconducting cyclotron used at TASCC. He did not hesitate before tackling other urgent problems like the orbital dynamics of Sputnik almost immediately after it was launched.
Working through Graham’s documents Jim found a previously unknown detailed calculation of the effect of discharging a double-barreled shotgun from a canoe. This information, of course, could be of critical importance to a duck hunter who has lost his paddle and is becalmed in deep water. The calculation defines the starting conditions – mass “M” for the boat and contents, and “m” for the mass of the shotgun projectile. The calculation specifically neglects water and air friction. Nine full pages of long-hand calculus then follow before the long-awaited solution appears. It turns out that it is always better to fire both barrels of the shotgun simultaneously than sequentially to receive the most recoil effect and hence to get the most impact on the canoe’s movement. The Society has not yet decided in which manner to transmit this important information to members of Ducks Unlimited.
The Society continues to welcome donations of artifacts and documents about the nuclear industry and will continue to inform the public when new, previously-unpublished information is found. To donate contact any member of the Executive or email us at info@nuclearheritage.com.
