Herbert L. Anderson

Herbert Lawrence Anderson (May 24, 1914 – July 16, 1988) was an American nuclear physicist who contributed to the Manhattan Project. He was also a member of the team which made the first demonstration of nuclear fission in the United States, in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University. He participated in the first atomic bomb test, codenamed Trinity. After the close of World War II, he was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago until 1982. There, he helped Fermi establish the Enrico Fermi Institute and was its director from 1958 to 1962. The latter part of his career was as a senior fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was a recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award. Anderson's lineage to Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, the Maharam of Padua, is detailed in The Unbroken Chain.

Born in New York, New York, Anderson earned three degrees at Columbia University, a Bachelor of Arts in 1931, a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering in 1935, and a PhD in 1940.

John R. Dunning, professor of physics at Columbia, closely followed the work of Ernest Lawrence on the cyclotron. Dunning wanted a more powerful neutron source and the cyclotron appeared as an attractive tool to achieve this end. During 1935 and 1936, he was able to construct a cyclotron using many salvaged parts to reduce costs and funding from industrial and private donations. The cyclotron design and building project began as Anderson was completing his engineering degree. At the suggestion of Professor Dana Mitchell, Dunning offered Anderson a teaching assistant position if he would also help with the design and building of the cyclotron. While working on his doctorate, Anderson made two major contributions to the project. The first was to design a high frequency filament supply, rather than the commonly used direct current version. This fostered longer filament life in the high magnetic field environment of a cyclotron. The second and more important contribution was the use of a pair of concentric lines to feed the cyclotron dees (cyclotron electrodes in the shape of a “D”), rather than the usual induction system. This refinement resulted in greater cyclotron efficiency and thereafter became a regular feature in cyclotron design. Others assisting Anderson in the construction of the cyclotron were Eugene T. Booth, G. Norris Glasoe, Hugh Glassford, and, of course, professor Dunning. In anticipation of conducting experiments with the cyclotron, Anderson also built an ionization chamber and a linear amplifier in late 1938.

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