Scientific Instruments and/as Oil Spillovers The Role of the Oil Industry in Developing Nuclear Instruments for the Manhattan Project

More than other history of science subfields, histories of instrumentation have considered the industrial dimensions of scientific knowledge. A few industries figure repeatedly in such histories: telecommunications; agribusiness; defense. We argue that the oil industry has been remarkably innovative in scientific instrumentation and indeed helped drive instrumentation R&D in other industries. These contributions are examples of "oil spillovers" flows of people, money, ideas, technologies between the oil industry and other industries or scientific fields. Viewing scientific instruments as oil spillovers helps resolve some old historiographic questions and raises new ones. In this article, we show that nuclear instruments were applied, scaled up, and developed during the Manhattan Project in close collaboration with the oil industry. We also briefly show that various nuclear technologies based on oil industry instrumentation continued to be improved postwar by oil companies such as Exxon, sometimes with the help of well-known scientists such as Hans Bethe.