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Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (accidently) discovered an image cast from his cathode ray generator, projected far beyond the possible range of the cathode rays. Rontgen took an X-ray photograph of his wife's hand which clearly revealed her wedding ring and her bones.
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Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie, discover Polonium, a radioactive element.
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Marie Curie discovers her second and last element, Radium, which is also a radioactive element.
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Albert Einstein created his world-famous theory mass-equivalence formula, E=mc^2.
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James Chadwick discovers the Neutron, the uncharged particle of the atom.
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John Cockcroft teams with Ernest Wilson to split the atom with protons accelerated to high speed
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Two German scientists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, demonstrate nuclear fission. They found they could split the nucleus by adding more neutrons.
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Leo Szilard and fellow Hungarian physicists Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller urged Albert Einstein to sign a letter they had drafted for President Roosevelt.
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The Manhattan Project is formed to secretly build the atomic bomb before the Germans
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Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard demonstrated the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in a lab under the squash court at the University of Chicago.
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The United States explodes the first atomic device at a site near Alamagordo, New Mexico - the invention of the atomic bomb
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The United States drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two Japanese cities, during WWII
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The U.S. Army's Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee sends the first nuclear-reactor-produced radioisotopes for peacetime civilian use to Brainard Cancer Hospital in St. Louis.
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The U.S. Congress passes the Atomic Energy Act to establish the Atomic Energy Commission, which replaces the Manhattan Project.
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The U.S. Congress passes the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, amending the 1946 act to allow the Atomic Energy Commission to license private companies to use nuclear materials.
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The first advanced gas-cooled reactor is built at Calder Hall in England. Intended originally to power a naval vessel, the reactor is too big to be installed aboard ship and is instead successfully used to supply electricity to British consumers
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The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 splits the Atomic Energy Commission into the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
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The Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurs in Ukraine during unauthorized experiments when four pressurized-water reactors overheat, releasing their water coolant as steam
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The fleet of more than 100 nuclear power plants in the United States achieve world record reliability benchmarks.
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Nuclear Technologies Timeline - Greatest Engineering Achievements of the Twentieth Century. (n.d.). Timeline of Nuclear Technology and the Atomic Bomb. (n.d.).
