Stanley Hall (1924 - present) was recruited to work on Princeton’s cyclotron as a machinist in 1942 when he was just 18 years old. After just a few weeks of working at Princeton the Princeton cyclotron group was asked to move to New Mexico to work on a recently-installed cyclotron at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Stanley Hall arrived at Los Alamos in 1943 and began work on the cyclotron in the P-12 physics division. Later, he joined the X-Division which used computing methods to design the atomic bomb. Hall began his work at Los Alamos as a civilian but was eventually drafted to the Special Engineer Detachment (SED). Hall remembers observing the Trinity Test of the world’s first atomic bomb in 1945. Hall recounts hearing the Star Spangled Banner playing over the radio as the detonation occurred. After the war, Hall received a Bachelors of Science in Physics and returned to Los Alamos, continuing his work there for 40 years, working primarily on supercomputers and early coding systems.

To learn more about Hall, visit: https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/stanley-hall