On December 6 he flew from England to the United States to join the Manhattan Project. With the help of the British secret service, Bohr had been smuggled to neutral Sweden. Word leaked that he was about to be arrested and would face a stark choice: Join Adolf Hitler’s atomic weapon project or be sent with his wife and son to almost certain death in a concentration camp. By 1943 the Nazi roundup and deportation of Jews in Denmark put Bohr at great risk, as his mother was Jewish. And the passenger who emerged, stiff from being crammed into an improvised bunk in the bomb bay of the unpressurized aircraft, was physicist Niels Bohr, 1922 Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in nuclear fission research.īohr had determined that the uranium isotope U-235 could create a chain reaction, and therefore could be used to construct a powerful atomic bomb, findings he detailed at a January 1939 conference in Washington, D.C. The year was 1943, and although the plane carried civilian markings and the pilot and navigator were nominally civilian employees of BOAC, it was a de Havilland Mosquito bomber. The British Overseas Airways Corporation flight from Stockholm, Sweden, landed at an airfield in Leuchars, northern Scotland, one of several hundred round trips the airline made between the two cities. The course of World War II would have been very different without Rolls-Royce’s immortal Merlin engine.

Future the wizrd documentary part2