Perhapsatron

Conceived by James (Jim) Tuck while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), he whimsically named the device on the chance that it might be able to create fusion reactions.

Jim Tuck was first introduced to these concepts in January 1947, in a meeting arranged at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell.

Thomson passed his concepts on to Stanley (Stan) W. Cousins and Alan Alfred Ware (1924-2010[6]), who assembled a linear pinch device using old radar equipment, and started operations in 1947.

Follow-on experiments used large banks of capacitors to store energy that was quickly dumped into the plasma through a solenoid wrapped around a short tube.

These experiments demonstrated a number of dynamic instabilities that caused the plasma to break up and hit the walls of the tube long before it was compressed or heated enough to reach the required fusion conditions.

[3] After a short time in Chicago, Tuck was hired by Los Alamos to work on the "Super" project (the hydrogen bomb),[5] where he was put on the task of calculating the nuclear cross section of the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction.

By this point Lyman Spitzer had introduced his stellarator concept and was talking the idea around the energy establishment, seeking funding.

[10] Tuck proposed the addition of a second, steady, magnetic field running longitudinal along the tube, a concept he called "adding a backbone to the plasma".

Another team at Los Alamos had been working on another fast-pinch machine known as Columbus that used electrical fields instead of magnetic, producing the same results.

Meanwhile the much larger ZETA machine in the UK also failed, after publishing results with great fanfare saying they had successfully achieved fusion.