On a spring morning in May 1932, readers across England picked up their Sunday copies of the popular Reynolds’s Illustrated News to find themselves confronted by astounding news. There, on the front page, underneath an advertisement touting custom for professor Conti, astrologist, and eclipsing reports of a “Peeress Robbed on Road” and an “Actress Killed at ‘Cavalcade’’’, the newspaper trumpeted, in headlines splashed across all five columns: “SCIENCE’S GREATEST DISCOVERY”.

Subheaded “The atom split at 100,000 volts”, the story breathlessly told of an earth-shattering breakthrough down in sleepy Cambridge. “A dream of scientists has been realised,” declared the paper.

The atom has been split, and the limitless energy thus released may transform civilisation. On the authority of Lord Rutherford, the world-famous scientist, Reynolds’s is able to announce exclusively that years of patient experiment at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge have at last been successful. The effect of the splitting of the atom is that the electrical power now available to mankind may be multiplied 160 times.

As if unsure that even this was doing justice to such weighty tidings, the paper then felt stirred to repeat its claim that it was reporting “the greatest scientific discovery of the age”.

New Zealander Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues at the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory no doubt would have preferred a more sober vehicle than Reynolds’s to convey this triumph of British physics to the world at large.

For years they had availed themselves of James Crowther, the capable and sympathetic Manchester Guardian journalist who, in Britain at least, had almost single-handedly created the role of science correspondent. But on May 1, 1932, when the extraordinary news broke, Crowther was abroad, attending a scientific gathering in Copenhagen and looking at the state of Danish agriculture. So Rutherford, director of the Cavendish—and a man who since the turn of the century had been obsessed with unlocking the mysteries of the atom—was condemned to see his news bathed in the lurid light of a sensationalist press.

He had announced the scientific breakthrough several days earlier, at a meeting of the Royal Society, and had spelled it out in a letter to the august journal Nature, which appeared that same weekend. Acting on a tip-off, however, Reynolds’s had cornered Rutherford before Nature hit the news-stands, and the doyen of atomic physics had gruffly admitted that the experiment had occurred and that the reporter’s conclusions were “fairly correct”.

Other newspapers scrambled to catch up. Cobbling together its own version of events the Sunday Express tried to reassure its readers with the headline: “The Atom Split, But World Still Safe”. The Daily Mirror was less restrained. “Let it be split so long as it does not explode”.

The collective nod of the popular press in the direction of safety was understandable given the disturbing notion of men in white smashing a tiny atom asunder to let loose who knew what unbridled power.

A play just then opening in London ensured that nerves were already on edge at the prospect. Wings Over Europe told the story of a young scientist who stumbles on the key to the energy bound up in atoms, endearingly demonstrating his skill by detonating a lump of sugar and carving out a crater the size of Vesuvius. When the British government fails to arrange for international control and the peaceful development of this powerful technology, the scientist threatens to reduce England to a “whirlpool of disintegrating atoms”.

This scenario, by playwrights Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne, took its cue from the master of cataclysm, H.G. Wells. Years earlier, at the outbreak of World War I, Wells had written of a devastating nuclear war to come. The misleadingly titled The World Set Free had unforgettably pictured humanity, in its fascination with atomic power, as “a sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find himself ablaze”.