Happy 111th Birthday to Dr. John Trump!
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.9068/full/
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.
After the war Trump became the director of MIT’s High-Voltage Research Laboratory, a position he held from 1946 until his retirement in 1980. In 1946 Trump cofounded the High Voltage Engineering Corporation (HVE) with Van de Graaff and British electrical engineer Denis Robinson, who had been a liaison to the Rad Lab during the war. Trump became the company’s chairman and technical director, and he took an active role in developing its accelerator business and several subsidiary companies. Trump was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1983 for his lifetime of path-breaking work.
In his obituary of Trump (see Physics Today, September 1985, page 90), Robinson recalled that his business partner had “an obstinate optimism that could fly in the face of all results and facts available to him and his coworkers. He cared very little for money and the trappings of money, but he did understand land; the land that he persuaded HVE to purchase in Burlington [on Route 128, Boston’s famed technology corridor] turned out to be worth as much as many years of the company’s profitable output.”