Herbert L. Anderson

Herbert Lawrence Anderson was an American nuclear physicist and professor of physics at the University of Chicago whose career spanned the earliest years of practical nuclear energy. In 1939 he took part in the first nuclear fission experiment conducted in the United States, at Columbia University, and he later worked under Enrico Fermi on the construction of Chicago Pile-1, the reactor that achieved the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in 1942. Anderson subsequently served as a key consultant to the DuPont Company on the design of the plutonium-production reactors at Hanford, Washington, and took part in the Trinity test, work that placed him at the center of the transition from laboratory nuclear physics to industrial-scale nuclear technology.