BENNETT, WILLARD HARRISON

born June 13, 1903, Findlay, Ohio, U.S. American physicist who discovered (1934) the pinch effect, an electromagnetic process that may offer a way to magnetically confine a plasma at temperatures high enough for controlled nuclear fusion reactions to occur. A faculty member of Ohio State University, Columbus, from 1930, Bennett became director of research of the Electronic Research Corporation in 1938. As a U.S. Army officer (1941-45) he worked on aircraft equipment development, and he served as chief (1946-50) of the physical electronics section of the National Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C. He was a consultant (1951-61) for the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and held the Burlington professorship (1961-76) of physics at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. In addition to his discovery of the pinch effect, Bennett proposed (1936) the tandem Van de Graaff accelerator, which later became widely used in nuclear research, and he invented a nonmagnetic mass spectrometer used in space research.