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The Rush to Patent the Atomic Bomb
The U.S. atomic bomb was such a secret, scientists and engineers sometimes talked in code. It was the Manhattan Project, not “The Atomic Bomb Project.” Plutonium was referred to as “copper,” and the bomb itself as “the gadget.”

But at the same time, scientists and engineers were furiously filing secret patent applications that described many of the parts in exquisite detail. Those patents sat not behind the fences at Los Alamos, but in a vault at the U.S. Patent Office.
[…]
A while back, [researcher Alex] Wellerstein was reading through an old news clipping from the 1960s which quoted a Manhattan Project scientist referring to a patent on the atomic bomb.

“I didn’t know what that meant,” Wellerstein says. “I didn’t know if it was rhetorical, or if there really was a patent on the atomic bomb.”

Wellerstein thought it was odd. Was the United States planning to sue the Germans if they built the bomb first?

Check out Wellerstein’s website for more on his research.

Found by brother Uncle Don