Drink like a Nuclear Physicist
Alexander Langsdorf's liquor cabinet. Dr. Langsdorf's contribution to the Manhattan Project was just a speck -- a speck of plutonium, some of the first usable sample of the radioactive element. Dr. Langsdorf produced the speck from a cyclotron, an atomic-particle splitter, which he and another scientist had built at Washington University in St. Louis for medical research just before World War II.
The speck was used in tests in Los Alamos, N.M., before the first atomic bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. That bomb was plutonium-fueled, as was the one dropped on Nagasaki. (The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a uranium-fueled device.)
Drink like a Nuclear Physicist
Alexander Langsdorf's liquor cabinet. Dr. Langsdorf's contribution to the Manhattan Project was just a speck -- a speck of plutonium, some of the first usable sample of the radioactive element. Dr. Langsdorf produced the speck from a cyclotron, an atomic-particle splitter, which he and another scientist had built at Washington University in St. Louis for medical research just before World War II.
The speck was used in tests in Los Alamos, N.M., before the first atomic bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. That bomb was plutonium-fueled, as was the one dropped on Nagasaki. (The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a uranium-fueled device.)