Video: '1942: UChicago’s race to the first nuclear reaction'

(Wednesday, December 2, 1942, 3:25 p.m. CST, part of the Manhattan Project, during World War II) — The Atomic Age was born today when scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory demonstrated the first artificially created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at a laboratory inside an enormous tent on a squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field.

The Met Lab researched plutonium’s chemistry and metallurgy, designed the world’s first nuclear reactors to produce it, and developed chemical processes to separate it from other elements.

In August 1942 the lab’s chemical section was the first to chemically separate a weighable sample of plutonium, and today, under the leadership of Italian scientist Enrico Fermi, the Met Lab produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in the reactor Chicago Pile-1.