History
At the start of the 1950s, the need for very short and powerful electrical pulses became evident to Soviet scientists conducting nuclear fusion research. The Marx generator, which stores energy in capacitors, was the only device capable at the time of producing such high power pulses. The prohibitive cost of the capacitors required to obtain the desired power motivated the search for a more economical device. The first magneto-explosive generators, which followed from the ideas of Andrei Sakharov, were designed to fill this role.
Read more about this topic: Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Generator
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“They are a sort of post-house,where the Fates
Change horses, making history change its tune,
Then spur away o’er empires and o’er states,
Leaving at last not much besides chronology,
Excepting the post-obits of theology.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)