High Speed Electronics
Not many people realise, but the high speed camera systems that filmed the dawn of the atomic age was actually integral to both the observer and the subject.
What does that mean?
Before Manhattan project, high speed cameras existed that could capture 1ms resolution.
This was enough to record the experimental data that would eventually be used to design and construct an atomic bomb.
High speed cameras could video bullets leaving gun barrels, so the optical and camera needs for the U-235 “gun method” experiments were easily met due to uranium 235’s “slow” critical insertion time of about 1 millisecond.
However, a much faster photographic process was required for plutonium experiments because it is spontaneously fissionable due to its plutonium 240 isotope content.
As a result, plutonium has a very fast critical insertion time of approximately 10 nanoseconds.
A rotating drum camera was initially used to conduct implosion studies to design and construct an atomic bomb using plutonium.
However, this camera was replaced in 1944 by a much faster rotating mirror camera with 10^-7 second resolution invented by Professor Mack.
The Mack Streak Camera assisted in the design and perfection of a plutonium cylindrical implosion process with the assistance of Berlyn Brixner. Think about it.
This was the process used in the Trinity test and in the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
No camera, no bomb.
In many endeavours across industry, the big breakthrough is gates behind many seemingly smaller side quests each one of which actually gates the primary objective.
In reality almost all major achievements are a cacophony of separate achievements, all completed in rapid succession to the point that they blurr together into one stunning mass…
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