Staff Biographies

Kenneth Bainbridge

As Trinity test director, Kenneth T. Bainbridge was responsible for overseeing the detonation of the world's first nuclear bomb. Bainbridge was born on July 27, 1904 in Cooperstown, New York. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1922 to 1926, earning B.A. and S.M. degrees in electrical engineering. Upon completing his work at MIT, he enrolled at Princeton. Over the previous few years, he had developed an interest in physics, and chose to pursue this new interest at Princeton. In 1929, he was awarded a Ph.D. in his new field.

Bainbridge enjoyed a series of prestigious fellowships after graduation, first awarded by the National Research Council, then the Bartol Research Foundation, and finally the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. When his Guggenheim fellowship expired, he accepted an associate professorship at Harvard University and began working on a pair of cyclotrons. Bainbridge's work at Harvard resulted in his recruitment as leader of the MIT radiation laboratory's radar project. He worked with several notable physicists at the laboratory, including Hans Bethe and Robert Bacher. Their next assignment would call for the assembly of an atomic bomb.

In May 1943, Bainbridge joined the Project Y staff at Los Alamos. First he led E-9, which was charged with instrumentation development. After the lab reorganization of 1944, he worked under George Kistiakowsky as X-2 leader. In this position, he was in charge of "gadget" engineering and test preparations. On July 16, 1945, Bainbridge and his colleagues detonated an implosion bomb. Bainbridge was relieved that the Trinity test had been a success, relating in a 1975 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article, "I had a feeling of exhilaration that the 'gadget' had gone off properly followed by one of deep relief. I wouldn't have to go to the tower to see what had gone wrong."

Bainbridge returned to Harvard after the war, and initiated the construction of a 96-inch synchro-cyclotron which is still in use today. From 1950-1954, he chaired the physics department at Harvard. During those years, he drew the ire of Senator Joseph McCarthy for his aggressive defense of his colleagues in academia. Throughout the '50s, Bainbridge remained an outspoken proponent of civilian control of atomic energy and the abandonment of nuclear testing. In 1976, Bainbridge retired from Harvard. He died in 1996 at the age of 91.