We The People: The Iowan whose efforts helped create the atomic bomb

IOWA (KTIV) - He was a poor farm boy from Iowa who went on to change the world by refining the elusive ingredient needed to make the atomic bomb.

This edition of “We The People” focuses on Iowan Harley Wilhelm. He is the Iowa State chemistry professor who helped stop a world war and spark the nuclear age.

“The day that the bomb dropped, my grandfather called home and told my grandmother, ‘Turn on the radio. You’ll know what I’ve been doing the last four years.’”

That is just one of the stories Teresa Wilhelm Waldof recalls about her grandfather, Harley Wilhelm.

It was Aug. 6, 1945, when the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. It was the first of two atomic bomb drops that ended World War II.

But it wasn’t until a year earlier that Wilhelm Waldof’s grandfather, chem