Toroidal Solenoid

The toroidal solenoid was an early design for a fusion power device, proposed in 1946 by George Paget Thomson and Moses Blackman as one of the first serious engineering concepts for controlled nuclear fusion. It called for a donut-shaped magnetic confinement chamber, with radio frequency heating used to bring the enclosed plasma to fusion-relevant temperatures while the toroidal magnetic field held it away from the chamber walls. As one of the earliest proposed magnetic confinement fusion devices, it predates the tokamak and stellarator concepts that later came to dominate mainstream fusion research, and its basic donut-shaped magnetic confinement idea anticipates the toroidal geometry those later devices share.