Thomas Edward AlliboneBorn 11 Nov 1903; died 9 Sep 2003 at age 99.English physicist who was a leading authority on high-voltage physics, a member of the Anglo-American team that worked on the atomic bomb, and the last surviving direct colleague of Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics. Allibone proposed to Rutherford that he could build a powerful generator to provide the huge voltages needed artificially to accelerate electrons in a vacuum tube. By 1927, Allibone had built the Voltage Doubler, a device in which electrons and atoms could be accelerated at high speeds, which was used by Rutherford and his team in their subsequent researches on particle acceleration. In 1944 he joined the British team working on the Manhattan project to build the atomic bomb in Berkeley, Cal., and Oak Ridge, Tenn. |