The story of how the Doomsday Clock began ticking 75 years ago, the brainchild of a Chicago artist
CHICAGO — Martyl Langsdorf designed just one magazine cover, but it has had considerable staying power. A prolific painter of abstract and figurative canvases, she was commissioned 75 years ago by the scientists who built the atomic bomb that ended World War II. By 1947 the Cold War was on, and they wanted to alert Americans to the danger of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.
They hoped to “frighten men into rationality,” said Eugene Rabinowitch, a biologist and the first editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
To express that objective visually, Langsdorf played with various images.
“The most significant of all was a sketch of a clock, which I made on the 8-by-11-inch back of a bound copy of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas,” she recalled.
