1. Up until 1913, US Senators were selected by their individual state’s legislatures.

2. The US Senate convenes in the north wing of the capitol building.

3. While each state has two Senators, elections are staggered so that no state’s two Senators will be up for election in the same year.

4. In the United States Senate’s history, 15 Senators have been expelled from membership. All but one of those suspensions was due to those Senators’ states seceding from the Union at the beginning of the Civil War. No US Senator has been expelled since then.

5. Two of the qualifications for a person to be allowed to be a Senator are that they must be at least 30 years old and must have been a US citizen for the previous nine years.

6. Three Senators have been elected to office and served before reaching the mandatory age of 30; Henry Clay (1806), Armistead Mason (1816), and John Eaton (1818). This was allowed to happen because the Senate polices itself and not enough scrutiny was given during those early days of operation.

7. The longest filibuster ever was done by Senator Strom Thurmond in 1957 when he spoke for over 24 hours in an attempt to stop Civil Rights legislation.

The US Senate is half of one of the three branches of government. Many of the more prominent people in public life have been senators and holding these positions comes with a great deal of responsibility. Making sure they live up to these expectations is part of the publics job.

1. Copper was in short supply due to World War II needs, the Manhattan Project borrowed 15,000 tons of silver to wind into coils for use with the magnets used in the project.

2. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, the think tank of the Manhattan Project, had been a private school for teenage boys prior to the government purchasing it for use in the nuclear weapons program.

3. Much of the early research performed on The Manhattan Project was done at Columbia University.

4. In July of 1945, President Truman disclosed to “ally” Josef Stalin, the leader of Russia, that America did in fact have nuclear weapons. Stalin wasn’t surprised, he had already learned this information through successful espionage efforts.

5. In August of 1945, President Harry S. Truman ordered the world’s first nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima, Japan. A little over four months earlier he had been unaware of the Manhattan Project’s existence and what it was developing. As Vice-President, Truman was out of the loop and was not briefed on the Project’s existence until President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed away in April of that year and Truman assumed the Presidency.

6. The farming communities of Hanford and White Bluffs, Washington were evacuated and taken over by the Hanford Site which produced weapons grade plutonium. These communities would never be inhabited again.

7. The Quebec Agreement was the name given to the treaty that allowed the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada to jointly pursue the nuclear bomb.

The Manhattan Project will forever remain one of the more controversial programs ever undertaken by the American government, or any other government for that matter. It truly is one of the most fascinating instances in history though.