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Hey, history lovers.

I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

So, here's a question that doesn't seem particularly ominous. What time is it?

Actually, not that kind of time.

Today, I'm talking about the time on the doomsday clock, the scariest alarm clock in the world.

Over the past seven decades, the doomsday clock has served as a metaphorical measure of humankind's proximity to global catastrophe.

Every year, scientists and nuclear experts set the time after grappling over the state of geopolitical affairs.

But the clock wasn't created by a scientist.

It was created by an artist.

It was created by an artist. It was 1947. World War II had ended two years before, and some scientists at the University

of Chicago were worried about what humanity had done. A few of them had been instrumental

in creating the atomic bomb that ended the war,

at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian lives. The scientists were going

to publish their misgivings in a new magazine called The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The magazine's

creators needed someone to illustrate its cover.

They found an artist named Martil Langsdorf.

At first, she thought about designing the cover with a U to represent uranium.

But as she talked with the scientists, she realized that what was most compelling was their

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