Wilcox P. Overbeck

Wilcox Pratt Overbeck (1912–1980) was an electrical and nuclear engineer who built instrumentation for the first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and went on to work at other United States Department of Energy national laboratories.

He previously worked with Vannevar Bush at MIT on the Rapid Arithmetic Machine.

[1] A one-hot ring counter is sometimes referred to as an "Overbeck ring";[2][3] he patented such a device made with a multi-anode vacuum tube in 1943.

[4] At the Met Lab in Chicago, he used such counters to scale the rate of detected ionization events, to estimate the rate of the nuclear reaction in the Chicago Pile-1, Enrico Fermi's famous first critical nuclear reactor.

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