Lyman Spitzer

Lyman Spitzer was an American theoretical physicist and astronomer who originated one of the earliest serious designs for a fusion power reactor. In 1951, after reading a since-discredited claim of controlled fusion from Argentina's Huemul Project, Spitzer worked out the concept of the stellarator, a device meant to confine superheated plasma in a twisted, figure-eight-shaped magnetic field. He proposed the idea to the United States Atomic Energy Commission that March, and the Commission approved funding that July for what became Project Matterhorn at Princeton University, the classified fusion research effort Spitzer led as its founding director; renamed the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 1961, it remains a leading center of fusion energy research.