Here is the exciting story of "the man who built the atomic bomb" and the dramatic incidents that led to the development of atomic energy.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City where he attended the Ethical Culture School. At the age of nine, his amazing grasp of languages and his over-all excellence as a student marked him as a genius destined for a brilliant future. His hobby was science. He graduated with honors and went on to Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in three years, at the age of twenty. Then he sailed for England to study at Cambridge. In Germany he received his Ph.D. at the University of Gotteingen, and continued his studies at Leiden and Zurich. His health began to suffer and he returned to America, settling on a ranch in New Mexico.

In 1928 he moved to California when he became a professor at both the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, easily becoming the most popular teacher on campus. Meanwhile his own studies continued apace, and mathematics and theoretical physics vied with philosophy, literature and foreign languages.

In 1943, "Oppy" was selected to head up the new Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, where forty-five hundred workers were engaged in a top secret project—the making of the A-bomb. Here began the drama of a heartbreaking search, of triumph and defeat, of a strange shut-in social life in a "secret city", armed guards, coded phone calls, the first test as the Chicago Stadium and the dazed triumph at setting off the first atomic fission.

Here is a lucid explanation of atomic energy—how it works; what it is; what it means to the world—to medicine, industry, agriculture; how atomic energy has been adapted to benefit mankind.

Here, too, is the story of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where men of genius formulate ideas that later become the blueprints of science, art, industry, and the humanities.

Just as men pioneered in the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Steel Age, so are they now engaged in the most exciting exploration of our time, and the one who has contributed most to the Atomic Age is Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.

From the book