Bainbridge, Kenneth Tompkins

1904 - Born on the 27th of July in Cooperstown, New York.

1921 - Entered MIT to study electrical engineering in a cooperative program with the General Electric Company.

1926 - Ken applied to Princeton and he is admitted.

1931 - Ken and Margaret ("Peg") Pitkin, then a member of the Swarthmore teaching faculty, were married.

1933 - They traveled to Cambridge.

1934 - Returned to the United States and began his long association with the physics department at Harvard University.

Kenneth Bainbridge was awarded the Levy Medal of the Franklin Institute.

1944 - Ken undertook the oversight of the design of high explosive assemblies and preparations for a full-scale test of a nuclear bomb.

1945 - Returned to academic science at Harvard. He undertook then to build a large mass spectrograph, designed for high resolution of masses and to replace the prewar cyclotron with a much more powerful one utilizing the then newly invented concept of synchronous acceleration.

1950-1954 - Served as chairman of the physics department at Harvard. He was one of the first members of the Harvard faculty. 

1975 - Enlisted to serve on a joint Iran-Harvard planning commission to design Reza Shah Kabir University for Iran.

1967 - Suffered a tragic loss when his wife Margaret (Pitkin) Bainbridge died.

1969 - Ken married Helen Brinkley King.

1996 - Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge died on 14th of July at the age of 92.