December 2, 1942: The world's 1st controlled nuclear chain reaction takes place, at a laboratory at the University of Chicago, as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project.
"Chicago Pile-1" was built inside a squash court under the football stadium, Stagg Field. It was directed by Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist, who becomes known as "The Architect of the Atomic Age."
Fermi described the reactor as "a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers. "Although the project's civilian and military leaders had misgivings about the possibility of a disastrous runaway reaction -- one that might, you know, lead to the destruction of the whole damn world -- they trusted Fermi's safety calculations and decided they could carry out the experiment in a densely populated area.
I have a theory as to why most of the adults in the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which takes place in and around Chicago in the Spring of 1985, seem so stupid: It might take place in an alternate reality, in which Fermi's chain reaction wasn't as controlled as everyone thought, and 99 percent of the people living and/or born in the "Chicagoland" area over the next quarter-century or so (leaving 1 percent to be smart, like Ferris and Sloane, Cam not so much), ended up stupid enough to fall for all of Ferris' schemes. Or, something similar happened to produce such widespread stupidity.
But it did work, proving it could be done. The Manhattan Project moved forward. The atomic bomb was built, and nuclear power became widespread by the time Fermi died in 1954, at the age of 53.
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December 2, 1942 was a Wednesday. Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And no games were scheduled for the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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