What Your Camera Flash Has to Do With an Atomic Bomb

On July 16th, 1945, 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, the White Sands Proving Ground was rocked by a massive explosion.

What you might not know is that much of the flash equipment you and I use today can trace its lineage back to the people and objects that made that test possible. Let’s jump in.Of course, this was the Trinity Test, the culmination of the Manhattan Project, and the first-ever nuclear detonation successfully achieved on Earth.Replica of the German experimental nuclear reactor at the Haigerloch atomic museum. Photo credit: “Schtone” via Wikimedia Commons.

Of course, the impetus for the United States officially entering the Second World War was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, on December 7th, 1941. The attack came after months of tense negotiation attempts between the US and Japan over the future of the Pacific region and the relationship between the two countries.

There was only one small problem. High explosives detonate at velocities measured on the order of thousands of meters per second. Composition B, for example, detonates at 8,050 meters per second, meaning that in an arrangement small enough to fit into a bomb, the fuze going off even microseconds too early or too late would ruin the perfect inverted spherical blast wave and the bomb would likely fizzle .

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