biography
| name: |
Van de Graaff, Robert J(emison)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1901–67)
|
| biography:
| Physicist, born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA. He conceived the idea for his constant-potential electrostatic generator (later known as the Van de Graaff generator) while he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford (1926–8), and constructed the first working model at Princeton (1929–31). At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1931–60), he developed his generator for use as a particle accelerator, but was unsuccessful in using it to bombard uranium and other heavy ions. He invented the insulating-core transformer in the late 1950s. |
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