The Stix family owned Rice-Stix Inc., a dry goods firm that was among the city's largest businesses at the turn of the 20th century.
[2] Stix graduated from John Burroughs School and served in the U.S. Army as a radio expert in the Pacific theater during and after World War II.
[3] He worked for Project Matterhorn,[3] a secret U.S. study of nuclear fusion, and developed the Stix coil to contain gases that were heated to solar temperatures with electromagnetic waves.
Stix's invention of the coil jump-started a period of intellectual productivity that revolutionized plasma heating research and whose influence is still felt in the field.
[8][9] His obituary in The New York Times said that Stix's "elegant mastery of the literally infinite complexities of waves in electrified gases helped create a new field of science.