Robert van de graaff biography of alberta

50 years ago this week

Businessman Joe Malisham, 36, was leader of Community Interest Corps, a group formed to make black children aware of the responsibilities that go along with citizenship. Mallisham said, “This is not a civil rights organization or a racial organization. We will work for the betterment of the community….”

Circuit Judge Fred Nicol addressed assembled jurors, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…” for the first time when the first women served on jury duty after the law was changed the previous year requiring women to serve. Breaking the all-male jury precedent were Savanah Davis Gladney of Holt, Eula H. Sanders and Janet C. Hinson of Tuscaloosa. Sanders was elected foreman of the jury. Five women were chosen to serve on a jury in Hale County.

Deaths this week included noted Tuscaloosa scientist Robert J. Van de Graaff, at 66. He was the developer of the Van de Graaff generator, a device that advanced nuclear physics.

The Tuscaloosa County float in the inaugural parade for Gov.-elect Lurleen Wallace was an old-time steamboat pushing a barge. It had a replica of the new governor’s home place and an Alabama seal with “No.1” projected from it. A miniature Denny Chimes was at the rear.

Four elected officials and two appointees in the district attorney’s office were sworn in by Circuit Judge W.C. Warren. Taking the oath of office were Coroner Rufus Strickland, County Court Judge Henry Mayfield, District Attorney Louis Lackey, Assistant District Attorney Claude Harris Jr., Sheriff Nathan Chism and Assistant District Attorney William “Bill” Foster.

First National Bank President Frank Moody announced the inauguration of the first charge account service. The service was explained like this: Users of the service will take a charge card issued by the bank and make purchases at any store which is a member of the service. At the end of the month the customer will get one billing from the bank, instead of several bills from v

Van de Graaff Model Accelerator

The Center for Nuclear Studies, or
“Days of Wine and Roses, and a few Thorns”
Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin (1962-1975)
by Professor Peter J. Riley

The 50’s and 60’s were “golden years” for a particular device, then much used in Nuclear Physics, the Van de Graaff accelerator. I arrived here at UT Austin in September 1962, fresh from my PhD work in neutron time-of-flight studies at the University of Alberta, and joined the team being assembled by the well-known nuclear physicist, Bernard B. (Bernie) Kinsey, to build and operate a large tandem Van de Graaff laboratory at UT Austin under the aegis of the Department of Physics. He had the promise of research grant support from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), later to become the Department of Energy, to provide the bulk of the funding to operate the laboratory, and the promise of the University of Texas to build an on-campus laboratory facility. Eugene (“Gene”) Bernstein, a more experienced experimental assistant professor than I was, had joined shortly before my arrival. Before Kinsey’s arrival at UT, professors Robert (“Bob”) Little and Emmet Hudspeth worked out of a small nuclear physics laboratory at the Pickle Research Campus, then called the Balcones Research Laboratory. Bob joined Bernie Kinsey in his efforts to build a new large laboratory, and became a close friend and “confidante”; Emmet’s work remained centered at Balcones. The only nuclear theorist at UT at that time was Eugene Ivash.

Kinsey, at right, had been a student of Lord Rutherford, and then worked under E. O. Lawrence at Berkeley on the earliest linear accelerator designs. Later, he assisted Sir James Chadwick on the design of the Liverpool cyclotron. After WW II, he moved from Britain to Chalk River, Canada, where he, together with G. Bartholomew, carried out a series of neutron-capture gamma-ra

“It’s an amazing machine,” says businessman and art collector Alan Gibbs, on the telephone from a Detroit hotel room. “The power flows out of it like a river of water. . . . It pours out. When you’re watching it, you’re just absolutely gripped by it. There’s no other work of art that’s more fascinating.”

For centuries, humankind has dreamed of harnessing the terrifying, destructive, and beautiful power of lightning. Since the 19th century, devices like the Tesla coil, which produces high-voltage, alternating-current electricity, have replicated its effects. But in the early 1990s, Gibbs began a quest to forge one Tesla coil to rule them all. In other words, to create artificial lightning on the scale of what Zeus might chuck.

In her short film “Lightning Dreams: The Electrum at Gibbs Farm,” Boston-based filmmaker Alberta Chu charts Gibbs’s passion for harnessing power as he commissions the world’s largest Tesla coil, “Electrum (for Len Lye),” for his estate in his native New Zealand. Chu’s film makes its world premiere at the Museum of Science on Wednesday, as part of an event called “Lightning Strikes.”

“I’ve always been interested in the intersection of science and art, the collision of science and art. You can’t separate the two,” says Chu, who has made films for PBS, National Geographic, and Discovery/The Learning Channel, and now runs an independent documentary film production company called ASKlabs. Originally a biologist, Chu entered filmmaking through the back door — by providing advice to science-fiction film productions. “We consulted on the ‘X-Men’ movies. In ‘Wolverine,’ [we consulted] about what his special abilities might be.”

Her “Lightning Dreams,” Chu says, was 15 years in the making. She made a previous short film about Gibbs’s Tesla coil project, “Electrum: Science as Art,” released in 2000 and shown on PBS. The new film, com

Gee's Bend Quilt Mural Trail Known officially since 1949 as the town of Boykin, the community of Gee's Bend is situated in Wilcox County in the west Alabama Black Belt. Today, mostly descendants of enslaved African Americans live in the community on the banks of the Alabama River. Although beset by the same poverty and economic underdevelopment that characterize other sections of west Alabama, Gee's Bend has demonstrated a persistent cultural wealth in the vibrant folk art of its quilt makers, whose work has gained national attention and critical acclaim.

Gee's Bend During the Great Depression Early inhabitants of Alabama tended to create communities along the many waterways of the state, and thus Gee's Bend's location is typical of many Alabama settlements. Joseph Gee, a large landowner from Halifax County in North Carolina, settled in 1816 on the north side of a large bend in the Alabama River near what would become the northeastern border of Wilcox County. He brought 18 enslaved Black people with him and established a cottonplantation. When he died, he left 47 slaves and his estate to two of his nephews, Sterling and Charles Gee. In 1845, the Gee brothers sold the plantation to a relative, Mark H. Pettway, and the Pettway family name remains prominent in Wilcox County. After emancipation, freed Blacks who stayed on at the plantation worked as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The Pettway family held the land until 1895, when they sold it to Adrian Sebastian Van de Graaff, an attorney from Tuscaloosa who operated the plantation as an absentee landowner who was also the father of famed inventor and physicist Robert Jemison Van de Graaff.

Gee's Bend Ferry in Camden The 1930s was a period of significant change in Gee's Bend. A local merchant who had extended credit to the residents of the town died, and his family demanded immediate payment of all debts owed to him. Families watched as all their food, animals, tools, and seed were taken from them. Members of the