Boyce D. McDaniel, the Manhattan Project physicist who was the last man to check the atomic bomb before the first test of the device in July 1945, has died of a heart attack. He was 84.
Mr. McDaniel, who died May 8 in Ithaca, also worked at the Enrico Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.
He had just finished his PhD work at Cornell University in 1943 when he was invited to join the Manhattan Project team at the secret facility in Los Alamos, N.M.
As part of the cyclotron research team, he played an important role in helping to identify the amount of the isotope uranium-235 needed to create the atomic fission to detonate the world’s first nuclear bomb.
After the war, Mr. McDaniel joined the Cornell faculty and became a full professor in 1955. He helped establish the university’s nuclear-studies laboratory, and in 1972 became director, a post he held until he took emeritus status in 1985.
Well-respected in the scientific community, Mr. McDaniel took a leave of absence from Cornell in 1972 to become acting head of the accelerator section at the Enrico Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The facility had been having trouble with component failure. Under Mr. McDaniel’s leadership, the accelerator problems were solved, and in short time, the facility was running in a productive manner.
Born in Brevard, N.C., Mr. McDaniel grew up in Chesterville, Ohio. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1938, and a master’s degree from what is now Case Western Reserve in 1940. For his PhD from Cornell, Mr. McDaniel researched the absorption rates of neutrons in the element indium.
In 1953, he was a Fulbright scholar at the Australian National University in Canberra. In 1959, he was Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Rome and the National Laboratory in Frascati, Italy.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a governing-board member of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Department of Energy High Energy Advisory Panel and Fermilab, and chairman of the Superconducting Supercollider Board of Overseers.
