1942

First controlled nuclear chain reaction achieved

The Natives Are Friendly

Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi, the most measured man in physics, had spent months assembling a pile of machined graphite bricks and uranium slugs beneath the west stands of Stagg Field — a disused squash court at the University of Chicago, chosen not for romance but because the athletic building it sat beneath was simply available. On 2 December 1942, at precisely 3:25 p.m., Fermi watched his instruments, gave a series of quiet instructions to withdraw the control rods by incremental inches, and allowed the reaction to sustain itself for twenty-eight minutes before nodding to have them reinserted. No drama, no heat felt through the walls — only a steadily climbing neutron count and a physicist who refused to be surprised by his own genius. The telegram sent to Washington reported the event in code: "The Italian navigator has just landed in the new world. The natives are friendly." What followed — the Bomb, the Cold War, three generations of nuclear deterrence, and eventually nuclear power generating roughly ten percent of the world's electricity — was rather more complicated than the natives had anticipated.

First detection of solar radio waves

Enemy Radar Jamming, Traced to the Sun

In February 1942, British Army officer James Stanley Hey was doing the unglamorous work of investigating why the country's radar stations were being swamped by interference — the kind of interference that tends to alarm people when enemy aircraft are what you are trying to detect. The source turned out to be directional, and that direction was the Sun. A large sunspot group was in an active phase, hurling radio-frequency noise across ninety-three million miles of interplanetary space and into the carefully tuned receivers of the Royal Corps of Signals. Hey's finding was classified for the duration of the war — the military had little enthusiasm for telling Germany how sensitive their radar was, or what had disrupted it — and was only published in 1946. It arrived as a revelation anyway: the Sun was not simply a ball of light but a roiling, chattering emitter of radio waves, and the whole cosmic sky, when listened to rather than watched, turned out to be full of noise. Radio astronomy, one of the most productive scientific instruments of the twentieth century, was born as a byproduct of looking for enemy bombers.

Penicillin mass production begins in the United States

From Bedpans to a Ton at a Time

When Howard Florey and his Oxford team first produced enough penicillin to treat a patient in 1941, they were growing the mould in whatever containers they could commandeer — hospital bedpans, milk churns, biscuit tins. The amounts were so small that they recovered the drug from the patient's own urine to re-use it. By 1942, with the United States newly at war and battlefield infections still killing soldiers at a rate that made commanders uneasy, the War Production Board decided that penicillin manufacturing was a matter of national urgency, and American pharmaceutical companies — Pfizer and Merck among them — began developing the deep-tank fermentation techniques that could produce the drug by the ton rather than the teaspoon. The yields per litre climbed by orders of magnitude over the following two years. By D-Day in 1944, enough penicillin existed to treat every Allied wounded soldier who needed it. The arithmetic of that sentence deserves a moment's reflection: before 1942, a scratch that turned septic could kill a young man in days; after, it mostly didn't. Few shifts in medicine's long history have been so rapid or so large.

Cyanoacrylate adhesive invented

A Gun-Sight Chemical That Stuck to Everything

Harry Coover

Harry Coover was not trying to invent superglue. A chemist at Eastman Kodak, he was in 1942 hunting for optically clear plastics that could serve as precision gun sights — a wartime priority that required materials transparent, hard, and, crucially, un-sticky. He synthesized cyanoacrylate and immediately noticed that it bonded to every glass surface it touched with maddening tenacity, which made it useless for precision optics and rather a nuisance in the laboratory. He set it aside. Six years later, a colleague encountered it again and made the same discovery. It was only in 1951, by which point Coover was working on jet canopy plastics, that he recognized what he actually had: an adhesive that required no heat, no solvent, no clamp, and no patience. Eastman 910, as the commercial product was first known, appeared on the market in 1958. The substance now holds together everything from model aeroplanes to the outer ear cartilage of surgeons working where sutures are impractical — evidence, not for the first time, that the wrong answer to a question can be considerably more useful than the right one.