On the RAND Corporation's Creation of "A Million Random Digits"

Just after World War II, The RAND Corporation was quietly working on a massive book of numbers. A Million Random Digits (With 100,000 Normal Deviates) was published by The Free Press in 1955 after almost ten years of meticulous production. Producing a random digit is complex. To make the tables in A Million Random Digits, RAND engineers created an electronic roulette wheel with 32 possible values by measuring the decay of a radioactive molecule gated by a constant frequency pulse.