What It Was Like to Witness the World ’s First Self-Sustained Nuclear Chain Reaction

Scientists achieved the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction 75 years ago on Dec. 2, 1942, on an underground squash court beneath the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field. The brains behind the discovery was Enrico Fermi, a leader of the Manhattan Project who had won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that led to the discovery of nuclear fission. Below is a narrative of that fateful day, from David N. Schwartz’s new biography of Fermi, The Last Man Who Knew Everything: On the morning of Wednesday, December 2, 1942, Chicago was in the grip of a cold snap. The previous day the high was thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, but when Fermi awoke the next morning the temperature had dropped to zero. Leona Libby accompanied him to the pile, where they took some measurements of reactivity to compare with the measurements taken the night before. Anderson, who had been up late, arrived next, and the three made the short walk to Libby’s apartment, where she cooked pancakes. Then they returned to the squash court to begin the day’s historic work. The process began about midmorning. The crowd overlooking from the balcony grew as the morning progressed and eventually included Zinn, Anderson, Szilard, Wigner, and several dozen other physicists who played a role in the pile’s construction. At 9:45 a.m., Fermi instructed three of the safety rods to be withdrawn. Immediately, the counters started clicking in response to neutron production, and Fermi watched...
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