Joseph_McKibben

Joseph Laws McKibben

Joseph Laws McKibben

American physicist and engineer

Joseph Laws McKibben (1912 – 2001) was an American physicist and engineer who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer as a group leader on the Manhattan Project.[1] He personally witnessed the Trinity test and flipped the switch that set off the atomic bomb at Trinity.[2] McKibben, motivated by his daughter Karan's paralysed hands due to polio, also invented the Air Muscle in 1957.[3][4]

Quick Facts Born, Died ...

He was born in 1912 in Missouri. He died in 2001 in Los Alamos, aged 89.[5]

References

  1. [1]
    "Manhattan District History, Project Y, The Los Alamos Project" (PDF). U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
  2. [2]
    "Joe McKibben, Scientist, Trinity Site, Los Alamos, NM, Manhattan Project Veteran, Scientist, Trinity Test Eyewitness". Atomic Heritage Foundation.
  3. [3]
    Gurstelle, William (21 May 2015). "Making a Simple Air Muscle - A father's love inspired this A-bomb maker to invent a pneumatic actuator that's used in robots today". Makezine. Santa Rosa, California, USA: Make.co. Retrieved 4 April 2020.
  4. [4]
    Gurstelle, William (1 Feb 2017). ReMaking History, Volume 3: Makers of the Modern World. Canada: Maker Media, Inc., 1160. p. Chapter 9, Joseph McKibben and the Air Muscle. ISBN 9781680450682.
  5. [5]
    "Joseph Laws McKibben". PeopleLegacy.com.


Flag of United StatesScientist icon

This article about an American physicist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Joseph_McKibben, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.