Blake Helms | Birmingham, Alabama

A few months ago I wrote an arti­cle on the Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab and now you can buy one for your very own! Sell­ing at the time of this writ­ing for just over $1700, this 1949 “toy” cost today’s equiv­a­lent of $400 and includes “a U-239 Geiger counter, Elec­tro­scope, Spinthariscope, Wil­son Cloud Cham­ber, nuclear spheres model, a book on prospecting […]

Con­tin­u­ing my impromptu series on atomic releated arti­cles, 93 year old Tsu­tomu Yam­aguchi has become the first per­son cer­ti­fied to have sur­vived both atomic bomb­ings on Japan. Yam­aguchi was in Hiroshima on a busi­ness trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suf­fered seri­ous burns to […]

When I was a kid we had lawn darts (giant weighted spears that you would throw in the air and try to avoid get­ting impaled) and Creepy Crawler (an oven designed for mak­ing lit­tle toy mon­sters out of molten plas­tic) and my par­ents thought they might be dan­ger­ous but noth­ing beats the Gilbert U-238 Atomic […]