Comment Otto Frisch. (Score 2) 47
The first company I worked for: Laser-Scan in Cambridge, UK, was founded by Otto Frisch
This from his Autobiography What Little I Remember
Finally the announcement came that the count-down was beginning: now it would be only minutes before the explosion took place. By that time the very first trace of dawn was in the sky. I got out of the car and listened to the count-down, and when the last minute arrived I looked for my dark goggles but couldn't find them. So I sat on the ground in case the explosion blew me over, plugged my ears with my fingers, and looking in the direction away from the explosion as I listened to the end of the count . . . five, four, three, two, one...
And then, without a sound, the sun was shining; or so it looked. The sand hills at the edge of the desert were shimmering in a very bright light, almost colourless and shapeless. The light did not seem to change for a couple of seconds and then began to dim. I turned around, but that object on the horizon which looked like a small sun was still too bright to look at. I kept blinking and trying to take looks, and after another ten seconds or so it had grown and dimmed into something more like a huge oil fire, with a structure that made it look a but like a strawberry. It was slowly rising into the sky from the ground, with which it remained connected by a lengthening grey stem of swirling dust; incongruously, I thought like a red-hot elephant balanced on its trunk. Then, as the cloud of gas cooled and became less red, one could see a blue glow surrounding it, a glow of ionized air; a huge replica of what Harry Daghlian had seen when his assembly went critical and had signalled his death sentence. The object, now clearly what has become so well known as the mushroom cloud, ceased to rise but a second mushroom started to grow out from its top; the inner layers of gas were kept hot by their radioactivity and, being hotter than the rest, broke through from the top and rose to even greater height. It was an awesome spectacle; anyone who has ever seen an atomic explosion will never forget it. And all in complete silence; the bang came minutes later, quite loud though I had plugged my ears, and followed by a low rumble like heavy traffic very far away. I can still hear it.
