Edwin McMillan

True story.

It was made by Edwin McMillan and Philip Abelson, Crazy Eddie, as they used to call him back in the day, in 1940 in Berkeley, California.

It's the element you use when you hire your own.

[laughs] When you hire your relative.

Only about 200 people in the world knew that life as they knew it was about to change.

For three years, scientists in secret cities around the United States had been in a race against time to complete the world's first atomic weapon.

And in July of 1945, the very first plutonium bomb was ready.

Constructing the gadget, as it was called, had taken $2 billion and the collective work of 400,000 people.

We did not want to say goodbye.

Wives were not the only women who were just holding their breath.

The female scientists who had been working on the project were just as anxious, if not more so.

Maria Geppert Mayer had been researching uranium gas and energy releases in nuclear explosions, and what happened at Trinity would be a culmination of her study.