The American atom had its origins in Europe at the turn of the century in
the minds of physicists. Between 1900 and 1914 a veritable revolution oc-
curred in our view of the material universe and its laws. The discovery of
radioactivity in the late 1890s was an alchemist's dream; one chemical ele-
ment could decay into another in a process of transmutation that gave off
new sources of energy. A very small amount of matter, by Albert Einstein's
1905 calculations, could be transformed into a very large amount of energy
proportionate to the square of the speed of light, a constant. X-ray saw
through matter, which could be understood as waves rather than particles.
The atom itself, that smallest and most discrete material object, appeared
to be made up of still smaller particles, a nucleus surrounded by electrons.

The technological of World War I--tanks, airplanes, flames-
throwers, and submarines--demonstrated the power of science at war. But
the discoveries of the 1920s and 1930s extended the revolution in physics
still further. Small particles at high speeds could be located and measured
only with a finite degree of uncertainty. Energy appeared to be released in
discrete amounts as "light quanta," behaving sometimes as waves and at
other times as particles. In 1932 experiments verified that the nucleus was
composed of positively charged protons and uncharged neutons, continuing
the breakdown of the material world.

Even before World War I, when drinkers consumed radium cocktails
that glowed in the dark of Paris and New York nightclubs, a few visionaries
anticipated the coming of the nuclear age. In 1914 the British science-fiction
writer and prophet of future technologies H. G. Wells wrote a book entitled
The World Set Free, in which he envisaged by the 1950s a world of "atomic
bombs" for war and nuclear reactors for peace.

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