John G. Trump
John George Trump was an American electrical engineer and professor at MIT. He developed high-voltage generators for cancer treatment, led radar deployment during World War II, and organized one of the first venture-funded companies, a particle accelerator manufacturer. He was the paternal uncle of President Donald Trump.
Trump earned his PhD in 1933 as Robert Van de Graaff's first student, working on the design and insulation of electrostatic generators. He joined MIT's faculty and first applied these generators to cancer radiotherapy, building compact X-ray machines for hospitals. Over a 37-year career, he developed new therapy techniques, oversaw treatment of 10,000 cancer patients, and taught hundreds of radiologists. Trump directed the High Voltage Research Laboratory from 1946 to 1980, which explored uses of electrostatic machinery in medical sterilization, spacecraft propulsion, wastewater disinfection, and power transmission.
In October 1940, he joined Vannevar Bush's new National Defense Research Committee as a technical aide and helped establish MIT's Radiation Laboratory, which invented and manufactured radar sets for Allied forces. As the lab's assistant director and secretary of the NDRC Microwave Committee, he administered contracts for the war's largest civilian research enterprise. In 1944, he was sent to England and France to direct the lab's field laboratory, where he organized radar deployments for the D-Day invasion, worked on V-1 rocket interception, and advised American commanders on radar use in combat.
In 1946, Trump organized the High Voltage Engineering Corporation with co-founders Van de Graaff and Denis Robinson. HVEC was one of the first two startups backed by the American Research & Development Corporation, the first modern venture capital firm. Originally building compact accelerators for cancer clinics, HVEC pivoted to research accelerators as federal funding for nuclear physics expanded. By 1970, nearly 70 percent of experimental nuclear physics papers relied on data from HVEC accelerators. After his 23-year term as chairman ended, Trump offered technical advice as the company diversified into accelerator-enabled industrial products.
President Reagan awarded Trump the National Medal of Science in 1983 for the "beneficial application of ionizing radiation to medicine, industry and atomic physics." He received wartime commendations from President Truman and King George VI. Trump installed the original Van de Graaff generator at the Boston Museum of Science, and many HVEC accelerators remain in use at physics laboratories worldwide.
Early life and education
New York years (1907–1931)
Born in the Bronx, New York City, on August 21, 1907, John Trump was the youngest of three children born to German immigrants Frederick and Elizabeth Christ Trump. When the Queensboro Bridge was finished in 1910, the family moved to Queens, eventually settling in the Woodhaven neighborhood. When Trump was 11, his father died in the 1918 influenza pandemic, leaving his mother to support the family.Like his siblings, Trump attended Richmond Hill High School, where he was a gifted student. He joined Western Electric's Manhattan engineering office in 1923, two years before it became known as Bell Labs.
Both John Trump and his older brother Fred joined their family's real estate firm. Their mother hoped that Fred would build homes and John design them. With support from his brother, John enrolled at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute to study architecture. The brothers' work together ended due to differences in business philosophy: Fred preferred to sell units as they were planned; John thought they should only sell once constructed. By the end of his freshman year, John left the family real estate business and switched his concentration from architecture to engineering.
Selected as Brooklyn Poly's valedictorian, Trump graduated from in 1929 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. While teaching electrical engineering at his alma mater, he earned his master's degree in physics from Columbia University in 1931.
MIT doctorate (1931–1933)
In fall 1931, Trump arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pursue a PhD in electrical engineering. MIT's new president, the physicist Karl T. Compton, was recruiting scientists to strengthen basic research at the institute. Vannevar Bush, dean of MIT's engineering school, recommended Trump work with one of these recruits: Robert J. Van de Graaff, a 29-year-old physicist developing his electrostatic generator. Van de Graaff became Trump's advisor and lifelong collaborator.Eager to artificially split the atom, Van de Graaff sought to build a model with sufficiently strong insulation to reach ten megavolts. He split his research between open-air models, which required large terminals, and vacuum-insulated designs, which were compact but technically challenging. In November 1933, he demonstrated the Round Hill generator, a air-insulated generator that produced dramatic electrical arcs and attracted broad press coverage. But the demonstration also revealed the design's fundamental limitation: high voltages broke down in open air.
To overcome these limits, Trump worked on vacuum techniques. He designed a synchronous alternating-current motor to power a vacuum, which proved highly efficient. Encouraged by this practical innovation, his dissertation also proposed a method to build vacuum-insulated, long-distance transmission lines for high-voltage direct current. In 1932, Van de Graaff filed to patent components in the transmission system. The new Tennessee Valley Authority showed interest in developing these patents for its hydropower projects, and Vannevar Bush offered to license them to the TVA by assigning them to the Research Corporation. Though the transmission project fell through, MIT became the first private university with a policy of research commercialization, and its arrangement was an influential predecessor to university patent licensing.
Trump received his doctorate of electrical engineering in 1933. His thesis, Vacuum Electrostatic Engineering, described these contributions and examined the factors governing voltage-insulation strength in vacuums.
Early career
After graduating, Trump remained at MIT as a research associate, then became an assistant professor in 1936. His research focused on improving high-voltage generators and finding new uses for them in industry.While writing his thesis, Trump had learned about an MIT lecture on medical uses of high-voltage x-rays. At the time, low-voltage radiotherapy techniques could only target superficial tissues and required long exposures that damaged skin. Because Van de Graaff sources produced steady, controllable, power that other high-voltage sources could not, Trump hypothesized that they could produce penetrating, precise x-rays that could target deeper tumors.
In May 1935, Trump showed that striking a gold target with the Van de Graaff electron beam produced abundant x-rays. The Godfrey M. Hyams Trust funded the construction of a 1-MV generator for Harvard's Huntington Memorial Hospital, which entered service in March 1937. The first of several hospital generators Trump would build, it required a room-sized voltage terminal with an internal focusing coil suspended over the patient in the room below. Though just one-third the height of the Round Hill generator, its operators saw it as "magnificent monster." Radiologist reported that it provided "increased depth dosages, greater skin sparing, and greater intensity" than radium exposure, then the prevailing technique. The first patient treated by the Huntington machine survived beyond four years. However, Huntington Hospital survived only another four years, and the machine was shut down in 1941.
Trump focused his research on making hospital generators smaller and more controllable. He adopted a pressurized gas system developed by Raymond Herb, which allowed him to increase dielectric strength at a smaller size. He built a compact 1.25-MV generator for Massachusetts General Hospital in 1940, which treated patients for sixteen years. He built another generator for the Philadelphia Oncologic Hospital. Trump's pre-war generator installations have been acknowledged as precursors to the field of radiosurgery.
Trump's gas-insulated generator would find other commercial applications. With World War II engulfing Europe and Asia, the United States began expanding its military fleet production. With engineers at Boston Navy Yard, Trump discovered that his high-voltage x-ray generator could detect manufacturing defects in ships and aircraft. Robert Van de Graaff would carry this work forward through MIT's High Voltage Radiographic Project, a Navy-funded effort to build Van de Graaff generators to find ship manufacturing defects.
World War II service
Administration of the MIT Rad Lab (1940–1943)
During World War II, Trump interrupted his research on x-ray therapy to focus on military uses of microwave radar. In early 1940, Vannevar Bush organized the National Defense Research Committee to direct the White House's wartime research strategy. Trump joined the NDRC as technical aide to MIT President Karl Compton, head of the committee's radar and detection section. In October 1940, British scientists demonstrated secret microwave transmitters to the United States, offering vast potential improvements in resolution and range. NDRC members pressed Compton to organize radar research at MIT. On October 24, Trump joined the first meeting of Radiation Laboratory, where a small group identified space at MIT and submitted a funding proposal to the NDRC. Within a week, the Rad Lab began recruiting top physicists and engineers from universities across the country.The Rad Lab focused on conceptual radar research in its first year. As an NDRC aide, Trump oversaw the lab's federal contract. The Pearl Harbor attacks pushed the Rad Lab into radar equipment production, and its rapid expansion pulled Trump inside the Lab's business operations. In March 1942, the lab reorganized around its expanded duties, and lab director Lee DuBridge appointed Trump to the lab's newly formed Steering Committee. A month later, Trump was appointed secretary of the NDRC Microwave Committee, overseeing all government radar research contracts.
During Trump's tenure in the Rad Lab's top administration, it would grow to become the war's largest civilian research contractor. It employed 3,879 personnel, constructed three buildings on the MIT campus, opened field operations around the world, and fulfilled $110,758,000 in government research contracts, or 80 percent of United States' radar research budget. The lab introduced new capabilities including early warning systems, fire control, and bombing through cloud cover, giving American forces a growing technological edge.