A city so secret that it did nor appear on any maps and the people who lived there got there mail from a town many miles away. At least that was the case in the 1940’s. Los Alamos, New Mexico is on the map now. During World War 2 secret research into atomic energy was performed here, resulting in the only two atomic bombs dropped during warfare.
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- The plateau that would later house Los Alamos had long been inhabited.
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- A rich-man’s boarding school and dozens of homesteaders were evicted and forbidden to say that they were.
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- Fat Boy, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
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- The atomic reaction was triggered by compressing fissionable material using explosives.
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- The implosion was synchronized using this kind of detonator.
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- Part of the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos was devoted to science history, like this vacuum tube based computer.
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- Which revolutionary computing devices have you used? the display asks. I answer “all of them” and I’m a Life Senior Member of IEEE that sponsored the exhibit.
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- Gratuitous engineer porn.
For more on the war in the pacific and Fat Boy, see my blog post, National Museum of the Pacific War. Also,