The Manhattan Project / Los Alamos (big-science template)

Editorial record

Plain-language summary

Between 1942 and 1945 the United States gathered physicists, chemists, and engineers at Los Alamos and other sites to build an atomic weapon, coordinating theory, experiment, and mass manufacturing on an unprecedented scale. The effort showed that a well-funded, centrally managed team could compress decades of research into a few years. It created the postwar model of the national laboratory and the pattern of governments financing ambitious technical projects. Many figures and methods from this work, including early electronic computation, carried directly into the founding of modern computer science.