David Lilienthal

David Eli Lilienthal was an American public administrator, born July 8, 1899 in Morton, Illinois and died January 15, 1981 in New York City, who led the two federal agencies most responsible for hydroelectric and nuclear power development in the mid-twentieth-century United States. After practicing public utility law in Chicago and serving on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission from 1931 to 1933, he joined the board of the newly created Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, becoming vice chairman in 1939 and chairman in 1941; under his leadership the agency built and expanded a system of dams that brought hydroelectric power and rural electrification to much of the American South before he stepped down in 1946. That same year he became the first chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, serving until February 1950 and steering the agency's early work toward civilian control of atomic energy and its peaceful applications, particularly nuclear power generation, while co-authoring the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report with Dean Acheson proposing international control of atomic energy. In 1955 he founded the Development and Resources Corporation to advise on large infrastructure and resource-development projects abroad, and he received the Public Welfare Medal in 1951.