Kenneth Bainbridge - Early Career

Early Career

Born in Cooperstown, New York, Bainbridge attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1922 to 1926, earning B.A. and S.M. degrees in electrical engineering. Upon completing his work at MIT, he enrolled at Princeton University. Over the previous few years, he had developed an interest in physics, and chose to pursue this new interest at Princeton. In 1929, he was awarded a Ph.D. in his new field.

Bainbridge enjoyed a series of prestigious fellowships after graduation, first awarded by the National Research Council, then the Bartol Research Foundation, and finally the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. When his Guggenheim fellowship expired, he accepted an associate professorship at Harvard University and began working on a pair of cyclotrons. Bainbridge's work at Harvard resulted in his recruitment as leader of the MIT radiation laboratory's radar project. He worked with several notable physicists at the laboratory, including Hans Bethe and Robert Bacher. Their next assignment would call for the assembly of an atomic bomb.

In 1932, Bainbridge developed a mass spectrometer with a resolving power of 600 and a relative precision of one part in 10,000. He used this instrument to verify the equivalence of mass and energy, E = mc2.

By establishing accurate comparisons of the masses of the light particles concerned in nuclear disintegrations, particularly that of 7Li, discovered by Cockcroft and Walton, he achieved a noteworthy triumph in the experimental proof of the fundamental theory of Einstein of the equivalence of mass and energy. —Francis William Aston,

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1937.