Wilcox Pratt Overbeck (1912–1980) was an electrical and nuclear engineer who built instrumentation for the first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and went on to work at other United States Department of Energy national laboratories. He previously worked with Vannevar Bush at MIT on the Rapid Arithmetic Machine.[1]
A one-hot ring counter is sometimes referred to as an "Overbeck ring";[2][3] he patented such a device made with a multi-anode vacuum tube in 1943.[4] At the Met Lab 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's famous first critical nuclear reactor.
References
edit- ^ Lee, J. A. N. (1995). International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers. Taylor & Francis. p. 150. ISBN 9781884964473. Retrieved 4 June 2020.
- ^ "RAMAC 305", IBM Customer Engineering Manual of Instruction (1959)
- ^ Technical Education Program Series, United States. Division of Vocational and Technical Education, 1960, p. 52
- ^ "Electronic switching device", Wilcox P. Overbeck's US Patent No. 2427533, filed in 1943
- Wilcox Pratt Overbeck c1912–1980 at Harvard
- Wilcox P. Overbeck at Atomic Heritage Foundation
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