Wilcox P. Overbeck

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]

Wilcox Overbeck at the 1962 reunion of the Chicago Pile-1 scientists

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

  1. Lee, J. A. N. (1995). International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers. Taylor & Francis. p. 150. ISBN 9781884964473. Retrieved 4 June 2020.
  2. "RAMAC 305", IBM Customer Engineering Manual of Instruction (1959)
  3. Technical Education Program Series, United States. Division of Vocational and Technical Education, 1960, p. 52
  4. "Electronic switching device", Wilcox P. Overbeck's US Patent No. 2427533, filed in 1943
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