For sale: one window, slightly used. Not the most exciting of classified ads, but this ain't your average pane of glass. Researchers on the Manhattan Project to create the first nuclear weapons stared through windows like this one to oversee production of the plutonium for Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945.
The New York branch of auctioneers Bonhams is selling one of the few remaining examples of these windows, at an estimated price of $150,000 to $250,000. The yellow edge isn't a trick of the light – it's a clue that the window is packed with lead oxide, layered between sheets of glass.
The lead blocked radiation from the plutonium, making it safe for researchers to look in from the other side, but also gave the window strange properties, such as crumbling rather than fracturing when cut. Thankfully for anyone planning to purchase a slice of atomic history, the window is not radioactive.
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