Wilcox P. Overbeck Explained

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

Notes and References

  1. Book: Lee . J. A. N. . International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers . 1995 . Taylor & Francis . 9781884964473 . 150 . 4 June 2020.
  2. http://www.ed-thelen.org/RAMAC/IBM-227-3534-0-305-RAMAC-r.pdf "RAMAC 305"
  3. https://books.google.com/books?id=0zoUAAAAIAAJ&q=%22overbeck+ring%22 Technical Education Program Series
  4. https://patents.google.com/patent/US2427533 "Electronic switching device", Wilcox P. Overbeck's US Patent No. 2427533, filed in 1943