The Bainbridge Brothers: From MIT to the Front Lines and the Atomic Bomb

Thursday - February 29 2024, 05:15 UTC - 8 months ago

William and Kenneth Bainbridge were brothers from Manhattan who both attended MIT and played important roles in World War II - one as a soldier and the other as part of the team that developed the first atomic bomb. Kenneth was an accomplished nuclear physicist and made significant contributions in the field of mass spectroscopy. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and later returned to MIT as a renowned director and head of the Department of Physics.

William Warin Bainbridge Jr., Class of 1922, and Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge, Class of 1926, grew up on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, the eldest of three sons of an upwardly mobile stationer who dabbled in real estate. Both went to MIT. And both would play important roles in World War II—one on the front lines at Normandy and at the Battle of the Bulge, the other with J. Robert Oppenheimer in Los Alamos.

Before making their way to MIT, the brothers attended the Horace Mann School, where they participated in athletics and Ken wrote for the newspaper and the humor magazine. But while Bill was playing hockey, Ken was busy exploring the new medium of radio. "I had a radio with an antenna on the roof [of the family townhouse]," he recalled in 1991. "The antenna and ground were connected across the vibrating contacts, which energized a commercial ultraviolet unit. I must have violated every bandwidth law." Ken’s five-watt ham radio station had just three call letters: 2WN.

In 1918, Bill arrived at the Institute, where he majored in engineering administration. He belonged to a dizzying number of organizations, including two fraternities (Alpha Tau Omega and Theta Tau), the football team, the wrestling team (which he managed), and the finance and budget committees. Ken joined Bill at MIT in the fall of 1921 to study electrical engineering, ultimately earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree through a co-op program with General Electric that required him to spend time at GE’s offices in Lynn, Massachusetts, and summers at the GE campus in Schenectady, New York. Ken, too, pledged Alpha Tau Omega, and he served on the board of MIT’s Voo Doo humor magazine. Master’s in hand, Ken and an MIT friend were admitted in 1926 to the doctoral program in physics at Princeton, where the dean reportedly told them, "You’re nice boys, but it’s too bad you never went to college." .

Despite the dean’s skepticism, Ken rose quickly in the academic ranks—first at Princeton, where he became a pioneering mass spectroscopist; then at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Labs on a Guggenheim fellowship; and then at Harvard, where he built cyclotrons. Along the way, he published the results of an experiment confirming Einstein’s most famous equation, E = MC2. He returned to MIT in 1940 to help found the Radiation Laboratory and played a key role in recruiting scientists and developing radar.

But on September 22, 1943, a letter to the local War Office from President Karl Taylor Compton noted that Bainbridge was unavailable for new local work because his "services were urgently requested by another scientific project of extreme urgency and secrecy." Since MIT couldn’t refuse, Compton wrote that "Bainbridge was released from the Radiation Laboratory to participate in this new activity." .

The "activity" was "Project Y" at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Ken and his cyclotron helped develop the first nuclear bomb. Ken settled at Los Alamos with his wife, Margaret, formerly a member of the Swarthmore College faculty, and their three children. Under Oppenheimer’s direction, Ken played a key role in the development and testing of the bomb. On July 16, 1945, the bomb was successfully tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

After the war, Ken remained at Los Alamos, continuing his work in nuclear physics. He also supervised the installation of the world's first cyclotron used for medical purposes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1950, Ken returned to MIT as the director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics and later served as head of the Department of Physics. He retired in 1976 and passed away in 1996, leaving a lasting legacy in the fields of nuclear and particle physics.

TLDR: The Bainbridge brothers, alumni of MIT, both played important roles in World War II - one on the front lines and the other with J. Robert Oppenheimer in developing the atomic bomb. Ken Bainbridge was an accomplished nuclear physicist and confirmed Einstein's famous equation E=MC². He spent most of his career at MIT, where he made significant contributions to the field of nuclear physics.