“Give me a hand”, then everyone on a balcony, the countdown and the split of a single nucleus of uranium was greeted with a bottle of Chianti: in a temple of university sport the nuclear era had just begun, thanks to an Italian with a code name Henry Farmer and an atomic boy who lived up to 94 years old
Ted Petry was the last to die, on July 28, 2018. He was 94 years old, he was the last living witness of the Chicago Pile-1, the first controlled and self-establishment nuclear reaction, the moment in which the era of nuclear energy has officially started. Petry remembered Enrico Fermi as “a quiet little Italian” rather sociable, who always turned with a calculator regulation in his hand. The phrase he felt more often to him was: “Come and help me”. The test day was on December 2, 1942, in the squash field located under the west stands of the abandoned stadium named after Alonzo Stagg Field, on the campus of the University of Chicago.