Biography Explores the Life of Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge ’21, Director of the Manhattan Project’s Trinity Test
—A.O.C. Nier, Nobel Prize Nominee in Physics
A new biography by David Bainbridge spotlights the life and achievements of his uncle, Horace Mann alumnus Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge ’21, an accomplished physicist who directed the Manhattan Project’s Trinity nuclear test. Game Changer: World War 2, Radar, the Atomic Bomb, and the Life of Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge (Rio Redondo Press, 2022) tells the story of Bainbridge’s career, his role in Project Y at Los Alamos, and his ultimate aversion to the use of nuclear weapons.
Kenneth Thomas Bainbridge (July 27, 1904 – July 14, 1996) attended Horace Mann from 1910 to 1921 before matriculating at MIT, where he earned a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in five years. After receiving his PhD from Princeton University, Bainbridge became a lead physicist at Harvard University who worked on cyclotron research. Later, he was named director of the Manhattan Project's Trinity nuclear test, which took place July 16, 1945.
Manhattan Project physicists at Los Alamos, from left to right: Kenneth Bainbridge, Joseph Hoffman, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Louise Hempelman, Robert Bacher, Victor Weisskopf, and Richard Dodson. Source: Science Photo Library
As the publisher summarizes, Bainbridge played a crucial role in ending WWII. He was the first physicist recruited for the radar lab at MIT and was a central figure in the development of radar that could detect the deadly German submarines. At Los Alamos, he and his team had to select the test site, develop the site and then all the instrumentation and details for the test. Throughout his career, Bainbridge was credited with not only exceptional skill and successful development of complex projects, but also his effective, kind, and gentle management. (Source: Rio Redondo Press)
According to Bainbridge’s obituary, after the war he was active in opposing the testing of nuclear weapons and the arms race, joining with 11 other prominent scientists in 1950 in asking President Harry S. Truman to declare that the United States would never use the hydrogen bomb first. And as chairman of the physics department at Harvard in the 1950's, he was a champion of academic freedom and opposed Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Source: New York Times, July 18, 1996)
You can purchase a paperback or kindle copy of Game Changer: World War 2, Radar, the Atomic Bomb, and the Life of Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge on amazon.com: https://tinyurl.com/KTBainbridge