The Doomsday Clock

1947

Date: June 1947 · Place: Chicago, Illinois · Figures: Martyl Langsdorf, designer · Eugene Rabinowitch, Bulletin co-editor · Hyman Goldsmith, Bulletin co-editor · Tags: Iconography, ColdWar, RecurringUpdate 01. Seven Minutes Martyl Langsdorf, a landscape painter married to Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf, designs the cover of the June 1947 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She crops a clock face to the upper-left quadrant and sets the hands at seven minutes to midnight because, she later says, it looks right. Editors Eugene Rabinowitch and Hyman Goldsmith run it on the cover. The image is meant for one issue. It has now run on every cover for seventy-nine years. 02. The Update as the Meme The replication mechanism is the announcement. In 1949, after the Soviet atomic test, the hands move to three minutes to midnight; in 1953, after the United States and Soviets test thermonuclear devices, to two minutes. Each move generates global front pages, and the same icon recirculates intact. The clock works because it is one image with one variable. Every newsroom in the world already has the file; the wire only needs to carry the new minute count. "Setting the hands of the Bulletin clock is not a measurement; it is a statement." — Eugene Rabinowitch, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editorial, 1958 Sources • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 3, no. 6, June 1947 • Kennette Benedict, 'Doomsday Clockwork', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2015 • Robert K. Elder and J. C. Gabel, 'The Doomsday Clock at 75' (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists / Hat & Beard Press, 2022)