Annie Oakley Shooting (1894) - Classic Edison Film

Annie Oakley was probably the most famous marksman/woman in the world when this short clip was produced in Edison's Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey. Barely five feet tall, Annie was always associated with the wild west, although she was born in 1860 as Phoebe Ann Oakley Mozee (or Moses)in Darke County, Ohio. Nevertheless, she was a staple in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and similar wild west companies. Because of her diminutive stature, she was billed as "Little Sure Shot." The man assisting her is this appearance is probably her husband, Frank E. Butler. Annie had outshot Butler (a famous dead-eye marksman himself) in a shooting contest in the 1880's. Instead of nursing his bruised ego because he had been throughly outgunned by a woman, Butler fell in love, married Little Sure Shot, and became her manager. Theirs was a solid and happy marriage that lasted 44 years, and when Annie died on November 3, 1926, at age 66, a heartbroken Butler followed her to the grave 18 days later.

Operation Ivy Nuclear Bomb Test (1952)

Operation Ivy was the eighth series of American nuclear tests, coming after Tumbler-Snapper and before Upshot-Knothole. Its purpose was to help upgrade the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons in response to the Soviet nuclear weapons program. The two explosions were staged in late 1952 at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshall Islands. The first Ivy shot, Mike, was the first successful full-scale test of a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon ("hydrogen bomb") using the Teller-Ulam design. Unlike later thermonuclear weapons, Mike used deuterium as its fusion fuel, maintained as a liquid by an expensive and cumbersome cryogenic system. It was detonated on Elugelab Island yielding 10.4 megatons, almost 500 times the yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Eight megatons of the yield was from fast fission of the uranium tamper, creating massive amounts of radioactive fallout. The detonation left an underwater crater 6,240 ft (1.9 km) wide and 164 ft (50 m) deep where Elugelab Island had been. Following this successful test, the Mike design was weaponized as either the EC-16 or TX-16, but it was quickly abandoned for solid-fueled designs after the success of the Castle Bravo shot. Jimmy P. Robinson, a USAF captain, was lost while piloting his F-84G through the mushroom cloud to collect air samples; he ran out of fuel and attempted to land on water but was never found. The second test, King, fired the largest nuclear weapon to date using only nuclear fission (no fusion nor fusion boosting). This "Super Oralloy Bomb" was intended as a backup if the fusion weapon failed. King yielded 500 kilotons, 25--40 times more than the nuclear weapons dropped during World War II.

Operation Crossroads Nuclear Bomb Test (1946)

Operation Crossroads was a series of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946. It was the first test of a nuclear weapon since the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, and the first detonation of a nuclear device since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Its purpose was to investigate the effect of nuclear weapons on naval ships. Crossroads consisted of two detonations, each with a yield of 23 kilotons of TNT (96 TJ): Able was detonated at an altitude of 520 feet (160 m) on July 1, 1946; Baker was detonated 90 feet (27 m) underwater on July 25, 1946. A third burst, Charlie, planned for 1947, was canceled primarily because of the United States Navy's inability to decontaminate the target ships after the Baker test. Charlie was rescheduled as Operation Wigwam, a deep water shot conducted in 1955 off the California coast. The Crossroads tests were the fourth and fifth nuclear explosions conducted by the United States (following the Trinity test and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). They were the first of many nuclear tests held in the Marshall Islands and the first to be publicly announced beforehand and observed by an invited audience, including a large press corps. To prepare the atoll for Operation Crossroads, Bikini's native residents agreed to evacuate the island. Many were moved to the Rongerik Atoll. Later, in the 1950s, a series of large thermonuclear tests rendered Bikini unfit for subsistence farming and fishing. Because of radioactive contamination, Bikini remains uninhabited as of 2013, though it is occasionally visited by sport divers. Although there are claims that participants in the Operation Crossroads tests were well protected against radiation sickness, one study showed that the life expectancy of participants was reduced by an average of three months. The Baker test resulted in the radioactive contamination of all the target ships. It was the first case of immediate, concentrated local radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. Chemist Glenn Seaborg, the longest-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called Baker "the world's first nuclear disaster."

Nuclear Test Film: Damage and Destruction (1945)

Historic film archives that document the history of the development of nuclear weapons, starting with the first bomb tested at Trinity Site in southeastern New Mexico in July 1945.