Two Billion Dollars, One Desert Sunrise

Two Billion Dollars, One Desert Sunrise

History & Legends

Part 5 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. While Germany’s program starved (Part 4), America built an industry the size of its automobile sector — in secret. This is the Manhattan Project, from a squash court in Chicago to a light in the New...
Christmas 1938: The Atom Splits

Christmas 1938: The Atom Splits

History & Legends

Part 3 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Part 2 followed the exodus of Europe’s Jewish scientists. Now, in a Berlin laboratory those laws had just emptied, the uranium atom comes apart. Kungälv, on the Swedish west coast, the third day of...
The Martians Who Fled to America

The Martians Who Fled to America

History & Legends

Part 2 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Part 1 followed the physics revolution to Leo Szilard’s traffic-light epiphany. This part is about the men who carried the idea to America — and the regime that made them refugees. Berlin, a night...
Moonshine: The Idea Born at a Traffic Light

Moonshine: The Idea Born at a Traffic Light

History & Legends

This is Part 1 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series on the science, the aircraft and the men and women behind the atomic bomb — from a London traffic light in 1933 to a mushroom cloud over the Kazakh steppe in 1949. London, September 1933. A short,...
The Flying Car That Actually Flew

The Flying Car That Actually Flew

Aviation World, History & Legends

For as long as there have been cars and aeroplanes, people have wanted to combine them. Almost everyone who tried, failed. But one man actually did it: he built a flying car that flew, that drove, that carried passengers, and that a government safety board certified...