Willard Harrison BennettBorn 13 Jun 1903; died 28 Sep 1987 at age 84.Willard Harrison Bennett was an American physicist who discovered (1934) the pinch effect, an electromagnetic process that may offer a way to magnetically confine a plasma at temperatures high enough for controlled nuclear fusion reactions to occur. He proposed (1936) the tandem Van de Graaff accelerator, which later became widely used in nuclear research. He invented a radio-frequency mass spectrometer, developed in 1955. Since it required no heavy magnet, it was the first launched into space to measure the masses of atoms. Sputnik III carried the first R-F mass spectrometer into space. It was the only space instrument used by the Russians and credited to an American inventor in their own Russian-language publications. |
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