‘The Doomsday Clock at 75′ explores how the Chicago-born cultural icon keeps tick, tick, ticking away
CHICAGO — The Doomsday Clock was born in 1947 in Chicago, a Cold War baby delivered as the illustration for the first cover of a new magazine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It was set at 7 minutes to midnight, an indication of how close a team of revered scientists believed the world was to nuclear annihilation.
It was designed by landscape painter Martyl Suzanne Schweig Langsdorf (who went by Martyl professionally). Her husband, physicist Alexander Langsdorf, was part of the team that developed the atomic bomb at the University of Chicago and was among the founders of the magazine.
