Jimmy Robinson and the atom bomb elements
USAF pilots flew into mushroom clouds to bring back samples that turned out to contain new elements – one of them didn’t make it home
At the edge of Arlington National Cemetery, US, there is a small slope nestled under oak trees, its banks occupied by white headstones in memory of the US military’s honoured dead. Among them is a marker for Captain Jimmy Priestly Robinson of the US Air Force, Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, Air Medal. It celebrates a pilot who flew into a hydrogen bomb’s mushroom cloud to give the world two new elements – but whose bravery was forgotten for half a century.
By 1952, the world knew of 98 elements. The last six had been created at the University of California, Berkeley, mainly under the leadership of chemist Glenn Seaborg. The US military tested the world’s first thermonuclear device, ‘Mike’, in the Marshall Islands, as part of Operation Ivy. Test pilot Jimmy Robinson was chosen to fly a cloud sampling plane for the Ivy Mike test.