Natan Yavlinsky

Natan Aronovich Yavlinsky (1912 to 1962) was a Soviet physicist who invented and developed the first working tokamak, the doughnut shaped magnetic confinement device that became the leading design for fusion power research. Born in Kharkov, he trained as an engineer at the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute, worked on artillery electrical systems during the Second World War and earned a Candidate of Sciences degree in 1948. That year he moved to the Kurchatov Institute, where he was given his own laboratory. Building on the tokamak proposal of Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm, he pursued a more static toroidal arrangement, and his model led to T-1, the first real tokamak, in 1958. He received the Lenin Prize and the Stalin Prize that year. He died in 1962 in an air crash at Gagra before the larger T-3 machine was finished, and T-3 later produced results that drew Western laboratories to the tokamak.