December 2 1942 – Enrico Fermi Creates a Self-Sustaining Nuclear Chain Reaction for the Manhattan Project
*Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons Of all the scientific advancements in the 20th century, only one could be said to have created a massive shift in the political and social realms in an instant: The Manhattan Project. The United States’ quest to develop an atomic bomb achieved the first step in a major innovation when physicist Enrico Fermi started the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942 in a makeshift lab at the University of Chicago. An Italian from Rome, Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1938 with a series of calculations guiding induced radioactivity (taking a neutral material and using radiation to force a radioactive shift). Leaving for Stockholm for the ceremony with his wife and children, he sailed on to New York City after receiving the award — the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in his homeland left him with no desire to return. From early 1939 on, Fermi and a team of researchers at Columbia University began working to test the possibility of nuclear fission — the splitting of atoms — after hearing Niels Bohr’s announcement that experiments in Germany proved it was possible. Performing trial after trial and demonstrating the release of immense quantities of energy, the group from Columbia gained the attention of a more secretive collection of brilliant minds: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.
