History Detectives

Manhattan Project ¬- A contributor is certain that his father worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. His father refused to talk about his war assignment, except to say that he sold his patent to the U.S. government for a single dollar. Along with the patent, the contributor has a letter from the Atomic Energy Commission stating that his father's patent had been declassified. Was this invention used to build the atomic bomb? To find out, HISTORY DETECTIVES host Wes Cowan travels to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and discovers a plan to hide atomic secrets in plain sight. Galleon Shipwreck - A woman in Portland, Oregon, has a large chunk of what she believes is very old beeswax. This 23-pound block, dug up on the northern Oregon coast in the late 1930s, seems to have been deliberately carved with strange markings. For centuries, ships carried beeswax on trade routes from the Far East to the American Pacific Coast. Could this beeswax have been cargo on a legendary ship that foundered more then 300 years ago? And what do those odd markings mean? HISTORY DETECTIVES host Elyse Luray goes to the Bee Lab at Oregon State University to decipher where the beeswax came from and visits an archaeologist in Olympia, Washington, to track which ship may have brought it to the Oregon coast. Creole Poems - A HISTORY DETECTIVES fan from Chicago recently unearthed a French manuscript rolled in a cardboard tube. "Duplessis, " his great-grandmother's mother-in-laws surname, is jotted in a margin, and "Rouzan," his grandmother's maiden name, appears at the bottom of another page. No one in the family knows anything about it, but the contributor, who reads a little French, thinks he has a collection of love poems, possibly written to one of his relatives. What is this? And why has his family kept it for 160 years? The questions lead HISTORY DETECTIVES host Gwendolyn Wright to New Orleans and to a piece of family history the contributor had never known.