Wilcox Pratt Overbeck (1912–1980) was an electrical and nuclear engineer who built instrumentation for the first nuclear reactor, the

Chicago Pile-1 Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) was the world's first artificial nuclear reactor. On 2 December 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in CP-1, during an experiment led by Enrico Fermi. The secret development of t ...

, and went on to work at other

United States Department of Energy national laboratories The United States Department of Energy National Laboratories and Technology Centers is a system of facilities and laboratories overseen by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for scientific and technological research. Sixteen of the sev ...

. He previously worked with

Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...

at MIT on the Rapid Arithmetic Machine. A one-hot ring counter is sometimes referred to as an "Overbeck ring";''Technical Education Program Series''
United States. Division of Vocational and Technical Education, 1960, p. 52 he patented such a device made with a multi-anode

vacuum tube A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied. The type kn ...

in 1943."Electronic switching device", Wilcox P. Overbeck's US Patent No. 2427533, filed in 1943
/ref> At the

Met Lab The Metallurgical Laboratory (or Met Lab) was a scientific laboratory at the University of Chicago that was established in February 1942 to study and use the newly discovered chemical element plutonium. It researched plutonium's chemistry and m ...

in Chicago, he used such counters to scale the rate of detected ionization events, to estimate the rate of the nuclear reaction in the Chicago Pile-1,

Enrico Fermi Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and ...

's famous first critical nuclear reactor.

References

Wilcox Pratt Overbeck c1912–1980
at Harvard
Wilcox P. Overbeck
at Atomic Heritage Foundation 1912 births 1980 deaths Nuclear engineers {{engineer-stub