Lawrence Hafstad
Lawrence Randolph Hafstad (born June 18, 1904 in Minneapolis , † October 12, 1993 in Oldwick , New Jersey ) was an American physicist who played an important role in the early development of nuclear technology in the United States.
Life
Hafstad, who had Norwegian ancestry, graduated from the University of Minnesota (bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1926) and received his doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1933 . He worked as an engineer for the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company from 1920 to 1928. From 1928 he was at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC , where he built an early Van de Graaff generator with Merle Tuve .
Immediately after the discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn , he was in one of the teams (with Tuve and Richard Roberts) who followed the experiments in 1939 in the United States. In 1940 he took leave of absence from the Carnegie Institution and went to the Office of Scientific Research and Development , which was created to support the US military efforts prior to its official entry into World War II.
From 1942 he was at Johns Hopkins University, where he was deputy director in 1942 and in 1946 as the successor to Tuve director of the laboratory for applied physics. During this time he worked on fuses for artillery shells (which were used, for example, in the Battle of the Bulge), on supersonic jet engines ( ramjet ) and rocket controls. In 1947 he became director of the Institute for Cooperative Research at Johns Hopkins University.
In 1947 he became Executive Secretary in the research department of the US Department of Defense (and thus coordinator of all military research in the USA) and from 1949 to 1955 he was head of the reactor development department in the US Atomic Energy Commission. In 1955 he was director of the nuclear power division of Chase Manhattan Bank and from 1955 until his retirement in 1969 he was vice president of the research laboratories of General Motors .
1969 to 1972 he was chairman of the Committee on Underwater Warfare of the National Research Council . In the 1960s he was also a member of the Advisory Committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission and its chairman from 1964 to 1968.
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| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hafstad, Lawrence |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hafstad, Lawrence Randolph (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 18, 1904 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Minneapolis |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 12, 1993 |
| Place of death | Oldwick , New Jersey |