ID 1032751
Lot 99 | The only color photograph of the Trinity Test
230 x 178mm (9 1/6 x 7 in.)
The dawn of the nuclear age: the only color photograph taken of the Trinity Test. From the collection of Roger S. Warner who supervised the assembly of the first three atomic bombs. A rare, apparently contemporary, color print of Jack Aeby's iconic image of the first uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction that occurred in the early morning hours of 16 July 1945.*
The photographer, Jack Aeby, came to Los Alamos by sheer chance. A graduate of the University of Nebraska, he was driving with a friend to California when they stopped at his brother’s house in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the night. Aeby’s cousin, who was also staying there, said he had just applied for, “an unknown job in the hills above Santa Fe … And he gave me an application.” Within a week, he had a job developing technical equipment to identify fissionable material, working with Emilio Segré primarily. At the time of the Trinity test in July 1945, Aeby related, that he ”wasn’t a photographer, that wasn’t my job, except I did carry a camera ever since high school almost daily and of course I couldn’t anywhere around Los Alamos. But Segrè decided he wanted a photo history of what the group was doing, so he got me appointed official photographer for the group and I used most of the time his camera, but I took mine so I could carry it all the time—he was using his own. Anyway, but when we went to the Trinity site for these ideas he negotiated with the Director and with the security services—got my official appointment as a photographer and one of the few people who had a camera at Trinity.”
Aeby managed to secure 100-foot reel of Agfa color motion-picture film, and he spent much of the day photographing the preparatory work of his team. But by nightfall, he realized he had only four frames left. Just before the test, stationed 6,000 yards northwest of ground zero, he turned his chair backwards “and sat in it using that as a tripod, aimed the camera at the detonation point … I opened the shutter wide—the full way, full stop—and put the shutter on bulb and held it open.” When the flash appeared, he “released the shutter, it closed, I cranked the exposure down to where it was reasonable, about 1,000 per second, and fired the other three shots in rapid succession. The middle one, by luck, turned out to be just about the right exposure” Word of his feat spread quickly, and images were requested before he was even able to develop the film. “And somehow the theoretical division got wind of that and they confiscated the photo for a time. And they actually did one of the first yield measurements by measuring the width of the fireball and estimated time of when that was made and they could back calculate something resembling a good estimate of the yield.” Following the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Aeby’s photo was published widely, first under the mistaken credit of the U.S. Army. It was only later that Aeby was given credit for his feat.
The correct orientation. This photograph, believed to have been printed in the mid-1940s, appears to be the one of the few examples where the image was not reversed. Aeby’s team at the Trinity test was stationed on the opposite side of ground zero from the main observation post where the official images of the explosion were made. Thus the majority of the reprints of Aeby’s photograph have been reversed to match the profile captured in all the other known images of the Trinity test
From the Collection of Roger S. Warner. The first known owner of the present print was Roger S. Warner (1907-1976), who oversaw the development of the non-nuclear elements of the first three atomic bombs ever assembled. In October 1944, Warner was a brilliant 37 year old Harvard and M.I.T.-trained engineer attached to the Office of Scientific Research & Development, overseeing the successful development of the DUKW (or Duck) amphibious vehicle that had proved so critical at the Normandy landings, when he received a cryptic message from his boss, Dr. Vannevar Bush: "Go see Major J. H. Derry in the New State Building. Do anything that you can do to help guide Ordnance activity on a project that is underway." Warner had never heard of the code name, "Manhattan Project," but next thing he knew he was on a plane to New Mexico. When he arrived at the top secret complex at Los Alamos, he found himself in the stockade, lacking all the proper credentials.
The next morning, paperwork properly sorted, Warner learned why he had flown all the way to the New Mexico desert: he was to be Director of Ordnance, responsible for the overseeing many of the non-nuclear operations necessary to the development of the atomic bomb. Most critically, he was placed in charge of overseeing the configuration of the explosive charges that would spark a nuclear chain reaction. Warner later put it, his “usefulness there was in making concepts take shape into hardware. I found myself operating not only in the mechanical engineering department and working in the field testing of non-nuclear portions of the system, but also in setting up of plans for the Nevada flight testing of Project Y.” (Quoted in Shirley Thomas, Men of Space. (1962), 265.) According to one of his colleagues at Los Alamos, Dr. Jerrold Zacaharias, “next to Robert Oppenheimer and General Groves … [Warner] is the one man I believe who made the first atomic bombs come out on time. Oppenheimer made the final decisions, carloads of Nobel Prize winners, and scientific prima donnas made the calculations and did the testing, but Roger make the stuff come in on time.” (Unpublished letter to Dr. Albert K. Hill, 26 October 1961). Please see lots 100 and 101 for additional photographs from Warner's collection.
Rare. We are not aware of any other contemporary print of this photograph in private ownership.
Provenance: Roger S. Warner — (inherited by) his nephew, the consignor.
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* Although some color motion picture footage was taken, it was of such a poor quality as not to be usable, and the film has since deteriorated. All other images, both still and motion pictures, were taken in black and white.
| Artist: | Jack Aeby (1923 - 2015) |
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| Place of origin: | USA |
| Auction house category: | All other types of objects |
| Artist: | Jack Aeby (1923 - 2015) |
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| Place of origin: | USA |
| Auction house category: | All other types of objects |
| Address of auction |
CHRISTIE'S 20 Rockefeller Plaza 10020 New York USA | ||||||||||||||
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| Lot number | 99 |
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| Auction house | CHRISTIE'S |
| Auction date | 19.10.2023 |
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| Lot number | 99 |
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| Auction house | CHRISTIE'S |
| Auction date | 19.10.2023 |
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| Lot number | 99 |
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| Auction house | CHRISTIE'S |
| Auction date | 19.10.2023 |
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| Lot number | 99 |
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| Auction house | CHRISTIE'S |
| Auction date | 19.10.2023 |
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| Lot number | 99 |
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| Auction house | CHRISTIE'S |
| Auction date | 19.10.2023 |