In 1939 the United States was on the threshold of a new era, but to the experts the future looked like a fourteen ton typewriter…In the United States at the time of the New York World’s Fair, with its theme of “the world of tomorrow”, a good many conditions prevailed that seem rather odd today…
Finally, 1939 was the year when college boys took up the fad of eating goldfish in huge quantities; it was the year whwn zippers became practically standard equipment on men’s trousers; and it was a year when women averaged five feet five inches in height and one hundred and twenty pounds. In retrospect, it is surprising how many truly important developments which have made obvious marks on the country and the rest of the world since then, had their beginnings in 1939.
![---One summer day in 1939, Einstein’s daughter, Margot Einstein, visited Rothman’s Department Store in Southold[35] and found what she had not been able to find elsewhere (a sharpening stone). Mr. Rothman recognized her and gave her the tool as a gift. The following day, as Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 was playing on his phonograph, Einstein walked in together with his sister Maja and his son Hans Albert, who himself was accompanied by his wife Frieda and their son Bernhard. Delighted by the music, Einstein directed the symphony with his arms, “humming and singing,” then asked, “Haff you any sundahls?” Margot had told him that this is the store “where one can buy anything in the whole world.” Eager to help, Rothman asked Einstein to follow him out back, where he offered Einstein the sundial in his yard, “you can take it and return it whenever you want to.” But Einstein burst out laughing, pointed to his feet, and repeated, “Sundahls!”---click image for source...](/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/einstein2-1024x946.jpg)
—One summer day in 1939, Einstein’s daughter, Margot Einstein, visited Rothman’s Department Store in Southold and found what she had not been able to find elsewhere (a sharpening stone). Mr. Rothman recognized her and gave her the tool as a gift. The following day, as Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 was playing on his phonograph, Einstein walked in together with his sister Maja and his son Hans Albert, who himself was accompanied by his wife Frieda and their son Bernhard. Delighted by the music, Einstein directed the symphony with his arms, “humming and singing,” then asked, “Haff you any sundahls?” Margot had told him that this is the store “where one can buy anything in the whole world.” Eager to help, Rothman asked Einstein to follow him out back, where he offered Einstein the sundial in his yard, “you can take it and return it whenever you want to.” But Einstein burst out laughing, pointed to his feet, and repeated, “Sundahls!”—click image for source…
On January 16, 1939, Niels Bohr of Copenhagen, Denmark, arrived in this country to spend several months in Princeton, N. J., and was particularly anxious to discuss some abstract problems with Einstein. (Four years later Bohr was to escape from Nazi-occupied Denmark in a small boat.) Just before Bohr left Denmark two of his colleagues, O. R. Frisch and L. Meitner (both refugees from Germany), had told him their guess that the absorption of a neutron by a uranium nucleus sometimes caused that nucleus to split into approximately equal parts with the release of enormous
quantities of energy, a process that soon began to be called nuclear “fission.” The occasion for this hypothesis was the important discovery of O. Hahn and F. Strassmann in Germany (published in Naturwissenschaften in early January 1939) which proved that an isotope of barium was produced by neutron bombardment of uranium….
—It began in the 1930’s, a fad so bizarre; some mistakenly believe it to be an urban legend. Goldfish swallowing, where a live goldfish is swallowed, started in the mid 1939 and sizzled out a few months later.
Few fads can be traced back to one person but the origination of goldfish swallowing is well documented. It began with a single man.
In a 1963 letter to the New York Times, Lothrop explained that the fad began in late 1938 when, he, Lothrop Withington Jr., a then Harvard freshman, was encouraged by his “campaign managers” to swallow a live goldfish as a publicity stunt in his bid for class president.—Read More:http://www.mortaljourney.com/2011/01/1940-trends/goldfish-swallowing
…Immediately on arrival in the United States Bohr communicated this idea to his former student J. A. Wheeler and others at Princeton, and from them the news spread by word of mouth to neighboring physicists including E. Fermi at Columbia University. As a result of conversations among Fermi, J. R. Dunning, and G. B. Pegram, a search was undertaken at Columbia for the heavy pulses of ionization that would be expected from the flying fragments of the uranium nucleus. On January 26, 1939, there was a conference on theoretical physics at Washington, D. C., sponsored jointly by the George Washington University and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Fermi left New York to attend this meeting before the Columbia fission experiments had been tried. At the meeting Bohr and Fermi discussed the problem of fission, and in particular Fermi mentioned the possibility that neutrons might be emitted during the process. Although this was only a guess, its implication of the possibility of a chain reaction was obvious. A number of sensational articles…
The news of this cornucopia of nearly simultaneous developments certainly did not stir up the uncomprehending public; the New York Times buried the report on an inside page. It was during that summer that Einstein wrote his famous letter to President Roosevelt explaining the desirability of encouraging work in the field of atomic fission. The President’s Advisory Committee on Uranium recommended, that October, as a first step, the procurement of large quantities of graphite and uranium oxide to be used for further experiments. The first transfer of federal funds to carry out the recommendation was to made in early 1940. ( to be continued)…
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