Atom Timeline: I. Rise of the Nuclear Age

 

Back to Atom

I. Rise of the Nuclear Age

II. From Hiroshima and Nagasaki
to the Cold War

III. The Industrial Atom:
Nuclear Energetics and the Cold War

IV. Chernobyl and Beyond

 




Stamp issued by Greece in 1983 to honor an International Conference on Democritus and his work.
In 5th cent. BC the atomic theory, which holds that matter is composed of tiny, indivisible particles in constant motion, was proposed by the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus and was adopted by the Roman Lucretius. However, Aristotle did not accept the theory, and it was ignored for many centuries. Interest in the atomic theory was revived during the 18th century following work on the nature and behavior of gases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_theo...
Wilhelm Roentgen, while conducting experiments with cathode rays, accidentally discovers of a new and different kind of ray. These rays were so mysterious that Roentgen named them ’x-rays’. He received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for this discovery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_R%C3%B6ntgen Radioactivity was discovered in 1896 by the French scientist Henri Becquerel while working on phosphorescent materials. At first it seemed that the new radiation was similar to the then recently discovered X-rays. However further research by Becquerel, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, Ernest Rutherford and others discovered that radioactivity was significantly more complicated. Different types of decay can occur. For instance, it was found that an electric or magnetic field could split such emissions into three beams. For lack of better terms, the rays were given the alphabetic names alpha, beta, and gamma, names they still hold today. It was immediately obvious from the direction of electromagnetic forces that alpha rays carried a positive charge, beta rays carried a negative charge, and gamma rays were neutral. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactivity The electron as a unit of charge in electrochemistry was posited by G. Johnstone Stoney in 1874, who also coined usage of "electron" in 1894. During the late 1890s a number of physicists posited that electricity could be conceived of as being made of discrete units, which were given a variety of names, but their reality had not been confirmed in a compelling way.The discovery that the electron was a subatomic particle was made in 1897 by J.J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, while he was studying "cathode rays". Influenced by the work of James Clerk Maxwell, and the discovery of the X-ray, he deduced that cathode rays existed and were negatively charged "particles", which he called "corpuscles." He published his discovery in 1897. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for this discovery. http://www.atomicarchive.com/Timeline/Ti... In experimental particle physics, a particle detector is a device used to track and identify high-energy particles, such as produced by nuclear decay, cosmic radiation, or reactions in a particle accelerator. Detectors designed for modern accelerators are huge, both in size and in cost. The notion counter is often used instead of detector, when the detector counts the particles but does not resolve its energy or ionization. Particle detectors usually can also track ionizing radiation (high energy photons or even visible light). If their main purpose is radiation measurement, they are called radiation detector, but as photons can also be seen as (massless) particles, the term particle detector is still correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_Detectors

The Rutherford model of the atom
The Rutherford model of the atom was devised by Ernest Rutherford around 1911 after he performed scattering experiments which showed that the Plum pudding model of the atom was incorrect. In the Rutherford model, an atom is made up of a nucleus surrounded by a cloud of orbiting electrons. However, the Rutherford model did not attribute any structure to the orbiting electrons. The Rutherford model of the atom was soon superceded by the Bohr atom, which used some of the early quantum mechanical results to give structure to the orbiting electrons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_model
The proton was discovered after Rutherford noticed that when alpha particles were shot into nitrogen gas, his scintillation detectors showed the signatures of hydrogen nuclei. Rutherford determined that the only place this hydrogen could have come from was the nitrogen, and therefore nitrogen must contain hydrogen nuclei. He thus suggested that the hydrogen nucleus, which was known to have an atomic number of 1, was an elementary particle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton

The 5th Solvay Conference
The the most famous Solvay Conference was in October 1927 and was the fifth Solvay International Conference. Its’ topics were on Electrons and Photons. The world’s most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. The leading figures were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_conference
A particle accelerator is a device that uses electric and/or magnetic fields to propel electrically charged particles to high speeds. The first one was built in 1929 by Ernest O. Lawrence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_ac... James Chadwick suggested that a new radiation, discovered by Walther Bothe and H. Becker in Germany, consisted of uncharged particles of approximately the mass of the proton, and he performed a series of experiments verifying his suggestion. Such uncharged particles were eventually called neutrons, apparently from the Latin root for neutral and the Greek ending -on (by imitation of electron and proton). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron#Discovery

The discovery of the Positron
The existence of positrons was first postulated in 1928 by Paul Dirac as an inevitable consequence of the Dirac equation. In 1932, positrons were observed by Carl D. Anderson, who gave the positron its name. Anderson also unsuccessfully suggested renaming electrons ’negatrons.’ The positron was the first evidence of antimatter and was discovered by passing cosmic rays through a gas chamber and a lead plate surrounded by a magnet to distinguish the particles by bending differently charged particles in different directions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron
In 1932 the physicist James Chadwick in England performed a series of experiments showing that a newly discovered radiation thought to be gamma rays was untenable. He suggested that in fact the new radiation consisted of uncharged particles of approximately the mass of the proton, and he performed a series of experiments verifying his suggestion. Such uncharged particles were eventually called neutrons, apparently from the Latin root for neutral and the Greek ending -on (by imitation of electron and proton). http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/library... Enrico Fermi irradiates uranium with neutrons. He believes he has produced the first transuranic element, but unknowingly achieves the world’s first nuclear fission. http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/timelin... Leo Szilard wrote a letter on August 2nd 1939, where he expressed his fears for Nazi Germany acquiring nuclear weapons, which Einstein agreed to sign as his own. http://www.dannen.com/ae-fdr.html

The Manhattan Project
President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiates the Manhattan Project. Formally it refers to the period of the project from 1942-1946 which was under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves, with its scientific research directed by the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, as the Manhattan Engineering District (MED). The project succeeded in developing and detonating three nuclear weapons in 1945: a test detonation on July 16 (the Trinity test) near Alamogordo, New Mexico; an enriched uranium bomb code-named "Little Boy" detonated on August 6 over Hiroshima, Japan; and a plutonium bomb code-named "Fat Man" on August 9 over Nagasaki, Japan. Born out of a small research program which began in 1939, the Manhattan Project would eventually employ over 130,000 people and cost a total of nearly $2 billion USD ($20 billion in 2004 dollars based on CPI), and resulted in the creation of multiple production and research sites operated in secret. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
The Russian Research Centre Kurchatov Institute, the first state national research Center of Russia, was set up in place of the I.V.Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy (former Laboratory No.2 of the USSR Academy of Sciences founded in 1943) in November 1991 in accordance with the Decree of President of Russia. The Centre is directlz governed bz the Russian Government and does not belong to either the Russian Academy of Sciences or any branch ministry. http://www.kiae.ru/eng/wel/all/dp1.htm

The Trinity test
The Trinity test, the world’s first atomic detonation, takes place at 5:29:45 a.m. mountain war time at Alamogordo, New Mexico. For the test, the plutonium-core nuclear weapon, nicknamed the Gadget, had been hoisted on the top of a 20-metre steel tower for detonation ? the height would give a better indication of what the weapon would be like when dropped from an airplane, as detonation in the air would maximize the amount of energy applied directly to the target (as it expanded in a spherical shape), and would kick up the least nuclear fallout. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekl...

Russias first nuclear bomb
Soviet Union successful detonated the first atomic device. The first was called First Lightning and was code-named by the Americans as Joe 1. It was a replica of the American Fat Man bomb whose design the Soviet scientists knew from espionage. http://portal.grsu.by/portal/LIBRARY/CD1...
The Laboratory No 2 branch was established with the aim of designing and manufacturing a nuclear device per se. At the time it was also known as Design Bureau No 1, Privolzhskaya Kontora (’The Volga Office’), ’KB-11,’Installation No. 558,’Kremlev,’Moscow, Center 300,’ and ’Arzamas-75’. The exceptional secrecy surrounded the program. Later on it became the All-Union (now - All-Russian) Scientific-Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF), widely known by the latest coded name of its location as Arzamas-16. the town reappeared under its origianla name of Sarov after the collapse of the Soviet Union. http://www.nato.int/acad/fellow/94-96/su...
5th cent. BC
|-------------------------------------------------------------
1895
--|----------------------------------------------------------
1896
---|---------------------------------------------------------
1897
---|---------------------------------------------------------
1900
-----|-------------------------------------------------------
1911
-----------|-------------------------------------------------
1918
---------------|---------------------------------------------
1927
--------------------|----------------------------------------
1929
---------------------|---------------------------------------
1932
-----------------------|-------------------------------------
1932
-----------------------|-------------------------------------
1932
-----------------------|-------------------------------------
1934
------------------------|------------------------------------
1939
---------------------------|---------------------------------
1942
----------------------------|--------------------------------
1943
-----------------------------|-------------------------------
1945-7-16
------------------------------|------------------------------
1949-8-1
--------------------------------|----------------------------
1956-2-1
------------------------------------|------------------------

I. Rise of the Nuclear Age

II. From Hiroshima and Nagasaki
to the Cold War

III. The Industrial Atom:
Nuclear Energetics and the Cold War

IV. Chernobyl and Beyond

Next >>


Compiled and edited by
Andreas Andersson
Sergey Glushakov