Manhattan Project Notebook (1942)

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This notebook records an experiment of the Manhattan Project, the all-out, but highly secret, effort of the Federal Government to build an atomic bomb during World War II. Recorded here is the world's first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, achieved on December 2, 1942.

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Eight months after the United States entered World War II, the Federal Government launched the Manhattan Project, an all-out, but highly secret, effort to build an atomic bomb—and to build one before the Germans did. The task was to translate the vast energy released by atomic fission into a weapon of unprecedented power. On December 2, 1942, a group of distinguished physicists, working under top-secret conditions in an unpretentious laboratory at the University of Chicago, took a crucial step towards this goal: they created the world’s first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi directed the experiment.


“We’re cooking!” was the exuberant reaction recorded when the experiment succeeded. (The data shown on these notebook pages is the record of the nuclear reactor’s response to the movement of the control rods.)


(Information excerpted from Stacey Bredhoff, American Originals [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001], pp. 94–95.)

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