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Kenneth Bainbridge

Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge (27 July 1904-14 July 1996) was an American physicist at Harvard University who worked on cyclotron research and served as Director of the Manhattan Project's Trinity nuclear test on 16 July 1945.

Biography[]

Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge was born in Cooperstown, New York in 1904, and he worked for General Electric in Lynn, Massachusetts and Schenectady, New York before continuing his studies at Princeton. He was awarded several fellowships during the 1930s, and his work on the separation of isotopes led to his invitation to join the Manhattan Project in 1943. On 16 July 1945, he conducted the Trinity nuclear test, in which the first atomic bomb went off without problems. He received two letters of commendation from project director Leslie Groves, and he returned to Harvard after the war and chaired Harvard's physics department from 1950 to 1954. He drew the ire of US Senator Joseph McCarthy for his aggressive defense of his colleagues in academia during the Second Red Scare, and he supported civilian control of nuclear power and the abandonment of nuclear testing. He died at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1996.

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