Odd Dahl

Odd Dahl with his wife Anna

Odd Dahl (born November 3, 1898 in Drammen , † June 2, 1994 in Bergen ) was a Norwegian physicist, adventurer, aviation pioneer and polar explorer.

Life

Dahl had no university education, but trained as an electrician and radio technician. He and an electrical engineer explored the possibility of radio communication with fishing boats, which led to his first publication. In 1921 he took flying lessons.

In 1922 he took part as a pilot in Roald Amundsen's Maud expedition to explore the Northeast Passage . Since the aircraft was damaged while attempting to take off from the ice, he spent two years doing geophysical observations in the Siberian Arctic (together with the geophysicist Harald Ulrik Sverdrup ) instead of flight explorations , during which he found time to study physics under the guidance of Sverdrup and became a skilled instrument maker.

On his return he became Sverdrup's assistant and in 1926 went to the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC , where he built one of the first Van de Graaff generators with Merle Antony Tuve and Lawrence Hafstad . He also built instruments for studying the Earth's magnetic field and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer . From 1936 he was at the Christian Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, where he built three Van de Graaff generators and a betatron .

After the Second World War, he directed the construction of a Norwegian-Dutch experimental nuclear reactor in Norway (with Gunnar Randers from the Institute for Atomic Energy in Norway and engineers from the CMI), the first outside the actual nuclear powers.

In 1951 he was invited by Pierre Auger and Edoardo Amaldi to work on the CERN project . From 1952 he headed the Proton Synchrotron Project at CERN, which led to the PS. First the machine should be similar to the Cosmotron , only with a higher power (10 to 15 GeV). During a visit (with Frank Goward and Rolf Wideröe ) in 1952 to the Brookhaven National Laboratory , which operated the Cosmotron, they learned about the new strong focus concept by M. Stanley Livingston , Ernest Courant and Snyder, which promised to achieve much higher energies. Dahl immediately aligned the project accordingly (he instructed the CERN employees to leave everything behind and only work on this task ) and convinced the CERN management of it. The work on it required new research instead of engineering, and Frank Goward took over development management and, after his death in 1954, John Bertram Adams .

In 1955 he was back in Norway, where he returned to nuclear technology. He directed the construction of a nuclear reactor in Halden and was founding director of Noratom from 1957 to 1958. Dahl later devoted himself to rockets for scientific purposes and was chairman of the Norwegian committee for space research from 1961 to 1966. In 1968 he retired.

Both the Norwegian particle accelerator specialists Björn Wiik (DESY) and Kjell Johnsen (CERN) were funded by him. Johnsen characterized Dahl as follows: He only accepted challenges and his intuition never fooled him .

In 1926 he received the Order of Saint Olav . In 1952 he became commander of the Order of Saint Olav and became commander of the Dutch Order of Orange-Nassau . 1951 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bergen . Since 1952 he was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences .

Dahl also went on expeditions to South America and Asia, about which he wrote two books.

Fonts

• Med muldyr og kano gjennom tropisk South America, Oslo 1927
• Med bil and husbåt in Asia, 1929

literature

• Andrew Sessler, Edmund Wilson Engines of Discovery , World Scientific 2007, p. 6

Web links

• Biography at Norsk Polarhistorie, Norwegian
• Item in Store Norske Leksikon, Norwegian
• Biography at CERN by Kjell Johnsen, pdf, English

Individual evidence

1. ^ Sessler, Wilson Engines of Discovery , p. 6.
2. ↑ Sessler, Wilson Engines of Discovery , p. 6. he accepted only challenging tasks and his intuition never failed him.