The architect of the atomic age had no emergency button, no computer failsafe—just a physicist with an axe and steady nerves standing between Chicago and catastrophe.
In 1942, scientists stacked roughly 45,000 graphite blocks beneath the stands of a Chicago football stadium and started the world’s first nuclear reactor — while one physicist waited nearby with an axe, ready to cut a rope and drop an emergency rod if the reaction ran out of control
Daniel Moran