JF Ptak Science Books: To the Moon on a Plume of U-235

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To the Moon on a Plume of U-235

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This reaching image appeared as an ad for a life insurance company (?) in the pages of Life magazine for 1942. What the company latched on was the uranium isotope²³⁵U (uranium discovered in 1789 by Klaproth and its radioactive state found by Henri Becquerel in 1896, ²³⁵U discovered by the mass spectrometer guy Dempster in 1935, and soon followed by the nuclear fission paper of 1938 by Hahn/Strassmann/Leitner) and how it would effectively be the power source ("cheap and plentiful) for, well, a lot, including cars and spaceflight. Anyway, the drawing is neat even if the Earth is way out of proportion, and so on:

Posted by John F. Ptak in History of the Future | Permalink

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