HISTORY LESSON 📚 John G. Trump transformed medicine and helped win wars: In 1931, Trump worked at MIT building the world’s most powerful generators. His research used vacuum tubes and compressed gas to produce high-voltage for powerful X-rays that were then used for the first radiation cancer treatments.
During WWII, Trump helped found the radiation lab hosted at MIT, the center of America’s war-time radar effort; a program rivaling the Manhattan Project. John G. Trump led the lab’s British branch. On D-Day, his radars jammed German defenses, marked drop zones, and guided bombers through cloud cover.
Trump returned to MIT and founded the High Voltage Engineering corporation, which brought radiation cancer treatments to hospitals worldwide, and became the leading provider of research particle accelerators.
John G. Trump received the National Medal of Science for his lifetime work of bringing the application of ionizing radiation to medicine, industry, and atomic physics, posthumously presented by President Ronald Reagan to his son.