The Trinity test of July 1945, the first nuclear explosion, a fireball a fraction of a second old
The Trinity test, 16 July 1945
Marked Berlin

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The atomic age

In December 1938 scientists in Berlin split the uranium atom, and Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch explained what had happened. Within seven years there were atomic bombs, and within twenty, nuclear power stations.

Place
Berlin · Chicago · Los Alamos · Obninsk · ChernobylThe whole world
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet
Image
United States Department of Energy, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. ISplitting the atom
  2. IIChicago Pile-1
  3. IIIThe bomb
  4. IVAtoms for peace
  5. VCalder Hall and Obninsk
  6. VIChernobyl and Fukushima

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Lise Meitner
  • Otto Hahn
  • Enrico Fermi
  • Leona Woods
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer

Objects

  • Hahn’s laboratory bench
  • Chicago Pile-1 graphite

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1938 to now. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?