From squash court to submarine

THE NUCLEAR AGE began 70 years ago on a squash court in Chicago, under the watchful eye of a man with an axe. A team led by Enrico Fermi, Italy's greatest physicist since Galileo, had been building a nuclear “pile” for weeks, slotting pellets of uranium and bricks of graphite into a carefully planned geometry through which ran various “control rods” of cadmium. The squash court was the only convenient large space available on the university campus. On December 2nd 1942 the pile had grown large enough to allow a nuclear reaction to take off when the control rods were drawn back from its heart.