One of the world's most significant historic documents will sell at public auction on the March 14. "Atomic Bombs," written just weeks before the first such weapons dropped on Japan, records a researcher's-eye view of the Manhattan Project.
It's the timing of the document that makes it so important – it was delivered on July 1, just 15 days before the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, the Trinity nuclear test (5-second-video-here) (pictured above) which occurred on 16 July 1945, and five weeks before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings which took place on 6 & 9 August 1945.
There could be few more iconic moments in the history of technology than the moment that picture was taken – the age of nuclear weaponry began and at the time this document was produced, the world was not entirely sure what would happen when the button was pressed (Trinity was the code word) and Trinity went off.
There will be rarer and more valuable trading cards than the $12.6 million paid for a Mickey Mantle, there will be more valuable guitars than the $6 million paid for Kurt Cobain's 1959 Martin D-18E, and there will be more movie props that sell for $5 million because of their role in a fiction. Heroes are regularly minted on the sporting field too, but when history is written 1,000 years from now, none of those things will get a mention.
The Manhattan Project will bear mention in any history of humanity whenever it is written.
I have spent large tracts of my life watching the auction prices of significant objects and attempting to understand what constitutes value on the auction block and this item strikes me as being almost priceless from any angle. It is one of those scientific objects that bridges the gap to becoming an object of art ... something that will be pondered long after science fiction has become reality.
Just what this document is worth and indeed, what it might even mean a few centuries from now will be answered in time, but if you are a disciple of the scientific method and a student of world history, IMHO this is one of the most significant documents ever offered at public auction.
How could this not be more important in the context of world history than any Leonardo Da Vinci manifest, Andy Warhol artwork or a religious document?
The auction is taking place on March 14 and you can watch the numbers climb in real time on RR Auctions' website, and it will be worth watching.
The RR in the auction house name stands for "Remarkable Rarities" which kinda sums up what this item is – we're forecasting that the price will go an order of magnitude or two beyond the $25,000 reserve price, and bidding is already at $32,000 as this story goes live, so consider yourself well ahead of the news.
Source: RR Auctions
