Part One:  The Origin of the Atom

Dr. Ray Palmer is a scientist, a professor of astrophysics at Ivy College and a world-traveling adventurer.

His girlfriend, Jean Loring, was a lawyer.

On an expedition with famed geologist Cave Carson that took him deep inside the earth, Ray Palmer discovered a material denser and heavier than any known on Earth—a smooth and shiny fragment of a substance that was, even at its small size, so massive it had its own gravitational field.

He noticed that it had a strange property of being able to focus certain bands of light so that anything in the beam of that focused light increased or decreased in size, depending on the side of the lens the light was focused.

With Carson’s help, he got the fragment to his lab in Ivy Town.

He was able to build a device that used the fragment as a lens.  With it, he was able to recreate the fantastic phenomena he noted the cave... with one exception:  The shrunken objects always exploded within minutes of changing size.

One day, while working on the problem, a group of criminals stormed into the lab.  They had heard of a fantastic jewel that Palmer supposedly found on his last outing.

In the violence that broke out, Palmer was pushed into the beam of the lens, and—to the bewildered point of view of the criminals—vanished.

He had actually shrank so small in size that he could not be seen.

And yet, he discovered that, at this size, he gained incredible super-strength.  Because his body was now unbelievably dense and compact, he now had the strength of ten men, and he was nearly invulnerable.

Afraid that he would explode at any minute, he sprang into action using his new powers.

Hardly more than a speck on the floor at their feet, Palmer was able to throw the criminals around as if they were helium balloons.  He captured them, called the police, and prevented the theft of his incredible lens device.

But time had run out.  He should have exploded... but he didn’t.

He realized he had found the proper tuning of the lens with the machine, so that he had now perfected the process of shrinking objects to very small sizes and then returning them safely to their original dimensions.

Part Two:

Palmer creates a costume that appears when he begins to reduce in size, and he takes on the secret identity of the Atom