John Henry Manley

Who was John Henry Manley?

John Henry Manley was an American physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley before becoming a group leader during the Manhattan Project.

He was born in 1907 in Harvard, Illinois. He graduated with a BS from the University of Illinois in 1929 and received his PhD in physics from the University of Michigan 1934. He was a lecturer Columbia University and later professor at the University of Illinois from 1937 to 1942. He married Kathleen, and had two daughters: Kim Manley of Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Kathleen Manley of Greeley, Colorado

By the time World War II broke out, Manley was at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory. In 1942, his friend and colleague, J. Robert Oppenheimer, held a meeting with several leading theorists at UC Berkeley. The topic of the meeting: develop preliminary plans to design and build a nuclear weapon. Manley, one the attendees, was tasked with learning more about the properties of fast neutrons.

Less than a year later, the center of the project had shifted to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. On April 4, 1943, Manley arrived at the laboratory.