Uncle Adam Schuch, Cryogenecist

One of my mother’s uncles, Adam Schuch (pronounced “shook”), was a cryogenecist who worked on nukes, post-World War II. I never met him, or I don’t remember meeting him, really. Either way, I found a few photos of him floating around online, and some other textual references to him or his work. Some of the references were rather recent. The Internet doesn’t have to be a total cesspool, you know.

Note: there’s no standard word for “a person who works in cryogenics,” so I had to play neologist and use “cryogenecist.”

Here he is with some other cryogenics- and cryogenics-related lads, in the south Pacific, during operation Operation Greenhouse in 1951, or Operation Hardtack in 1958; I don’t think the photo’s owner was sure. I circled him. From “Tributes to Dr. Frederick J. Edeskuty” (*see note at bottom of post):

In June of 1952, he published “Low Temperature Thermal Expansion of Uranium.” “An Anomalous Type of He 3 Flow” was published a month later:

He’s mentioned in a 2006/2007 paper here, as a former member of the Condensed Matter and Thermal Physics Group at Los Alamos. I’m not sure of the context of the paper, but it doesn’t seem strictly academic:

The August 11, 1958 edition of the Albuquerque Journal has an article about a cryogenics project, demonstrated in part by Uncle Adam, at a conference in Geneva. Not a bad summary of the purpose and importance of his research:

One of his publications from 1962, is cited here, in a paper published in 2006: “Cryogenic Boiling and Two-Phase Chilldown Process under Terrestrial and Microgravity Conditions” (PDF). Sounds like light weekend reading. Uncle Adam’s paper was called “Problems in cool-down of cryogenic systems,” which also sounds like a blast:

Here he is in the Atom, which looks like a monthly newsletter for the physics labs at Los Alamos, in July of 1968 (PDF), when he became a fellow of the American Institute of Chemists:

Mentioned again in the Atom, in March of 1969:

Lastly, and for a third time, Uncle Adam showed up in the Atom, in 1970, for 20 years of service at the Los Alamos lab:

* As of Feb 26, 2022, the Cryogenic Society website is down, and there’s no archive.org link for the page. I will keep the link up in case it becomes active again.