The Montreal Laboratory in Montreal, Canada, was established by the National Research Council of Canada during World War II to undertake nuclear research in collaboration with the United Kingdom. After the Fall of France, some French scientists escaped to Britain with their stock of heavy water, and joined the British Tube Alloys project to build an atomic bomb. In 1942, it was decided to relocate the work to Canada. The Montreal Laboratory was established in a house belonging to McGill University, but moved to the Université de Montréal in March 1943. The first laboratory staff arrived at the end of 1942. John Cockcroft became director in May 1944. In August 1943, Mackenzie King, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill (pictured) negotiated the Quebec Agreement, which merged Tube Alloys with the Manhattan Project. Work moved to the Chalk River Laboratories, which opened in 1944, and the Montreal Laboratory was closed in July 1946. Two reactors were built at Chalk River: the small ZEEP, which went critical in September 1945, and the larger NRX, which followed in July 1947, and was for a time the most powerful research reactor in the world.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Laboratory

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1170:

Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket was slain in his own cathedral by four knights of Henry II of England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Becket

1779:

American Revolutionary War: British soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell captured Savannah, Georgia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_Savannah

1891:

Physical education teacher James Naismith introduced a game in Springfield, Massachusetts, with thirteen rules and nine players on each team that he called "Basket Ball". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_basketball

1911:

Sun Yat-sen was elected in Nanjing as the Provisional President of the Republic of China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen

1959:

Physicist Richard Feynman gave a speech entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", which is considered the birth of nanotechnology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_Plenty_of_Room_at_the_Bottom

1993:

The Tian Tan Buddha, at the time the world's tallest outdoor bronze statue of the seated Buddha, was completed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tian_Tan_Buddha

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

writing on the wall: An ominous warning; a prediction of bad luck. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/writing_on_the_wall

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

Men learn little from others' experience. But in the life of one man, never The same time returns. Sever The cord, shed the scale. Only The fool, fixed in his folly, may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns.   --T. S. Eliot https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot