Dale Babcock

Dale Babcock was a physical chemist and colleague of Crawford Greenewalt, himself a chemical engineer who married a Du Pont and eventually became president of the company. Greenewalt had been working in the development of nylon, but had to put that aside when he became technical director of the firm^‘s Manhattan Project contracts. Greenewalt took Babcock and a few other close Du Pont colleagues with him into the new world of atomic energy. Although Babcock eventually became an expert on nuclear reactors, he also did research on heavy water, an expensive and difficult alternative for graph­ite in reactor operation.