1942 - Science

Science

More than 40 physicists witness the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on a controlled basis December 2 in a former squash racquets court beneath the West Stands at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field; Enrico Fermi, Arthur H. Compton, Leo Szilard, Eugene P. Wigner, and Ernest O. Wollan are among those who observe the phenomenon (see plutonium, 1941). Now 40, Wigner is employed by the federal government's atomic-bomb project (code name: Manhattan Engineering District) at Los Alamos, N.M., along with Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, California Institute of Technology physicist J. (Jules) Robert Oppenheimer, 38, and others. Security is so tight at Los Alamos that the place is never identified as such in any documents, but the KGB's Operation Enormous has infiltrated the Manhattan Project from the start, and its scientists include New York-born Harvard physics major Theodore "Ted" Hall, 19, an idealist who is fearful that the United States will become fascist if it wins the war and has gone to New Mexico determined to leak atomic secrets to the Soviet Union (see 1944).

Biochemist Lawrence J. Henderson dies at Cambridge, Mass., February 10 at age 63; Nobel physicist and crystallographer Sir William H. Bragg at London March 12 at age 79; Nobel physicist Jean Perrin at New York April 17 at age 71; archaeologist-Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie at Jerusalem July 28 at age 89; anthropologist Franz Boaz at New York December 21 at age 84.