This minute-by-minute recount details the morning of the first atomic bomb

The Manhattan Project absorbed the British and Canadian “Tube Alloys” atomic program and drew on a dazzling array of scientific talent.

William Laurence of The New York Times, whose reporting on the bomb won a Pulitzer, saw Trinity Test as crystallizing a new relation with the universe. There, he wrote, “an elemental force [was] freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years” as, for the first time, humans used an energy source that “does not have its origin in the sun.” “All seemed to feel,” wrote Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, General Groves’s deputy, “that they had been present at the birth of a new age – the Age of Atomic Energy.” FULL STORY from Inverse