Kodak Film Exposed Nuclear Fallout

In 1945, Kodak accidentally discovered that the United States had secretly tested an atomic bomb after radioactive fallout fogged its sensitive X-ray film. At Kodak’s Rochester, New York headquarters, physicist Julian H. Webb traced the ruined film to strawboard packaging made in Vincennes, Indiana, more than 1,900 miles from the Trinity test site in New Mexico. Webb found that the contamination was not radium but artificial radioactive material later identified as Cerium-141, a fission product from the July 16, 1945 Trinity detonation.

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