Kenneth Bainbridge (1904 - 1996)

Kenneth Bainbridge was born on July 27, 1904, in Cooperstown, New York. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he obtained a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. While interning at General Electric laboratories, he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Physics at Princeton University, which he earned in 1926. In 1932, he developed a mass spectrometer with enough resolution to confirm Albert Einstein's famous E=mc² equation.

After being awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, he used it to work at Ernest Rutherford's Cavendish Lab at Cambridge University. Upon his return from England, he took an associate professorship at Harvard University. His interest in mass spectroscopy led him to begin work on cyclotrons. In October 1940, E.O. Lawrence recruited him to work at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California, for work on a microwave "radio location" project for the U.S. Navy.

In May 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer invited him to join the Project Y team at Los Alamos. He initially led E-2, the instrumentation group, which developed X-ray instrumentation for examining explosions. In March 1944, he became head of a new group, E-9, which was charged with conducting the first nuclear test. Following the successful Trinity Test early in the morning of July 16, 1945, he then made his legendary remark, "Now we are all sons of bitches".

After the end of World War II, he returned to Harvard and began work on a 96-inch synchro-cyclotron. From 1950 to 1954, he chaired their physics department. Throughout the 1950s, Bainbridge remained an outspoken proponent of civilian control of nuclear power and the abandonment of nuclear testing. Bainbridge retired from Harvard in 1975 and died in Lexington, Massachusetts on July 14, 1996.