John Trump
John George Trump was born in 1907 and received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1929. In 1931 he received a master’s degree in physics from Columbia University and in 1933 a doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT, where he worked under physicist Robert J. Van de Graaff (see Physics Today, February 1967, page 49). Trump then worked as a research associate at MIT before receiving an appointment there as an assistant professor of electrical engineering in 1936.
During the 1930s Trump built an enduring partnership with Van de Graaff developing high-voltage electrostatic generators. In 1933 Van de Graaff completed a spectacular 12-meter-high generator that was capable of producing a potential difference of 5 million V and had to be housed in an airship hangar at Round Hill in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, about 110 km south of Boston. Trump later contributed to the redesign of the generator when it was relocated to the Theater of Electricity at Boston’s Museum of Science, where it is still demonstrated. Trump became a life trustee of the museum.
Van de Graaff originally designed his generator to be a particle accelerator, but he and his collaborators quickly found applications in high-voltage x-ray generation as well. In 1937 a 1 MV x-ray generator was installed at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Boston, where it supplemented radium in cancer therapies. Trump became an expert in medical applications of high-voltage radiation and later taught courses for hospital physicists. Circa 1960 Trump was one of the pioneers of rotational radiation therapy. (You can watch him describe his work in a video at MIT’s Infinite History website.)<
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950, and to the National Academy of Engineering in 1977.
During World War II John Trump served as a member of the Steering Committee overseeing the U.S. government research laboratory, the Radiation Laboratory, which was located on the MIT campus, Division 14 (radar) of the National Defense Research Committee. This Laboratory was responsible for research and production of radar systems. Trump was also the Head of Division 12, Field Service, in the Radiation Laboratory, as well as the director of the BBRL (British Branch of the Radiation Laboratory) when it was established in 1944 in Malvern, England.
After the war he co-founded, with Robert Van de Graaff and Denis Robinson, the High Voltage Engineering Corporation to manufacture generators for use in nuclear research, industrial processing, radiography, and medicine. Trump directed the High Voltage Research Laboratory on the MIT campus from 1946 to 1980.
The focus of his research was high voltage phenomena, the acceleration of electrons to high energies, and the interaction of radiation with living and non-living matter.
"John Trump helped redesign these 12-meter-high Van de Graaff generators, seen here in an airship hangar at Round Hill, Massachusetts. The generators are now at Boston’s Museum of Science. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives"
