Two Anniversaries

Today would have been Lucille Ball's 100th birthday (she was 77 when she died).

Today is also the 66th anniversary of the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare.

"I Love Lucy" has had a huge impact for a black-and-white television show that ended its first run 53 years ago. It had a technical impact for the television industry, as the show wrote the book as to how situation comedies are recorded (using three cameras and in front of a live audience). It is a formula that works and nobody has seriously tried to mess with.

The atomic bomb had an effect that, paradoxically, has made the world a more peaceful place. the scientists of the Manhattan Project achieved the dreams of Richard Gatling, Alfred Nobel, Hiram Maxim, Nikola Tesla and others: It made a direct war between major powers unthinkable. Even before the theory of nuclear winter was developed, leaders on both sides of the Cold War recoiled at the idea of incurring retaliatory attacks which would kill tens of millions of their own citizens, though the world has come pretty damn close at times.