01/11/2026
Happy birthday to Donald William Kerst, the American physicist who made a significant contribution to accelerator and plasma physics and developed the betatron!
Kerst was born in 1911 in Galena, Illinois. He attended the University of Wisconsin where he earned a PhD in Physics in 1937. After graduation, Kerst researched the development of X-ray technology but struggled to come up with the high energies required, which could not be produced at the time. Later, he moved to the University of Illinois, where he developed the betatron, the first device to accelerate electrons with sufficient momentum as to produce nuclear transformation in atoms using electromagnetic induction.
The betatron influenced all subsequent accelerators, as the high energy X-rays it produces has had extensive applications in the industrial and medical fields to this very day.
