Daily Dose of Crimson Tide: Robert Van de Graaff

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Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries

Although Robert Van de Graaff’s name isn’t as nearly recognized in Tuscaloosa as much as his brother Bully, Alabama football's first All-American, he had a profound affect on how we all live our lives today.

Van de Graaff was born in the Jemison-Van de Graaff Mansion in Tuscaloosa, and his three older brothers were all All-Southern college football players for the Crimson Tide. Robert was following in their footsteps when a serious injury during his senior year ended his playing career.

Robert attended Alabama as well, and earned his B.S. and master's degrees. He became a physicist and developed an electrostatic generator that accelerated subatomic particles for use in nuclear physics research. 

In 2004, there was a dinner at the Jemison-Van de Graaff Mansion in honor of the 75th anniversary of Robert’s atomic generator. The keynote speaker was 87-year-old L. Worth Seagondollar, who worked on the famous Manhattan Project.

“He’s the guy who physically built the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima,” mansion manager Jim Young told the Tuscaloosa News. “What he talked about was the importance of the Van de Graaff accelerator in determining what the nucleus of plutonium was in regard to how they would cause the explosion. They were only able to do that using the Van de Graaff accelerator.

“And he said if we hadn’t had the Van de Graaff accelerator or generator, the war would have lasted a whole lot longer. It would have taken hundreds of thousands of additional lives, not only United States soldiers but Japanese as well. The bomb killed 185,000 Japanese, but many times more would have been killed if the troops on Okinawa and in the east would have made the invasion into Japan.”

Robert’s influence as a scientist and inventor didn’t end with the war or at Princeton University. In 1946, he started his own company, the High Voltage Engineering Corporation. The beam-control techniques it developed made possible the manufacture of microchips by shooting atoms into silicon, laying the foundation for the computer age.

Van de Graaff taught at Princeton and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A crater on the far side of the moon is named after him.

Some of this post originated from "100 Things Crimson tide Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die," published by Triumph Books