Background
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill was born on February 6, 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, United States, to the family of Edward Gerard O'Neill, a lawyer, and Dorothy Lewis O'Neill (née Kitchen).
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill (1927-1992), American physicist who invented the colliding-beam storage ring and was a leading advocate of space colonization.
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill (1927-1992), American physicist who invented the colliding-beam storage ring and was a leading advocate of space colonization.
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill (1927-1992), American physicist who invented the colliding-beam storage ring and was a leading advocate of space colonization.
(In 1969 America had proved its leadership in human spacef...)
In 1969 America had proved its leadership in human spaceflight but among the nation's youth, an anti-technology mindset was growing. Princeton Physicist and Professor Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, inventor of the revolutionary Colliding-Beam Storage Ring technology that is now the basis of all high energy particle accelerators, asked his students if they could come up with a working Space Colony system to permanently and happily house tens of thousands of regular people. They dug into the challenge. Soon his small band of students grew to scores of researchers both young and old, all united in the Big Dream of letting real people have a real choice in their futures. In 1974, Dr. O'Neill put his three-pronged plan of Space Colonization, Space Solar Power, and Large Scale Space Construction into easily accessible form with the release of the book The High Frontier.
https://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-Human-Colonies-Space/dp/1686872720/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Gerard+K.+O%27Neill&qid=1601588580&sr=8-1
1977
(This report grew out of a 10-week program in engineering ...)
This report grew out of a 10-week program in engineering systems design held at Stanford University and the Ames Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration during the summer of 1975. The project brought together nineteen professors of engineering, physical science, social science, and architecture, and two co-directors. This group worked for ten weeks to construct a convincing picture of how people might permanently sustain life in space on a large scale. The goal of the summer study was to design a system for the colonization of space. This report, like the design itself, is intended to be as technologically complete and sound as it could be made in ten weeks, but it is also meant for a readership beyond that of the aerospace community. Because the idea of colonizing space has awakened strong public interest, the report is written to be understood by the educated public and specialists in other fields. It also includes considerable background material. The technical director, Gerard K. O'Neill of Princeton University, made essential contributions by providing information based on his notes and calculations from six years of prior work on space colonization and by carefully reviewing the technical aspects of the study.
https://www.amazon.com/Space-Settlements-Design-N-S/dp/1410218228/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Gerard+K.+O%27Neill&qid=1601588580&sr=8-2
2004
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill was born on February 6, 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, United States, to the family of Edward Gerard O'Neill, a lawyer, and Dorothy Lewis O'Neill (née Kitchen).
Gerard attended Newburgh Free Academy, where he edited the school newspaper, and also took a job at a local radio station as a news broadcaster.
O'Neill began his scientific education as a radar technician in the United States Navy. He then went to Swarthmore College as an undergraduate and to Cornell University as a graduate student in physics. He earned his doctoral degree in 1954.
After earning his doctoral degree in 1954, he came to the Princeton University physics department as an instructor. Two years later he published a letter in Physical Review entitled "Storage-Ring Synchrotron: Device for High-Energy Physics Research." In two pages it laid down the path that high-energy physics has followed for the subsequent 36 years. O'Neill built a storage ring himself at Stanford to convince people that it was feasible. He solved the tough technical problems of injecting a beam from an accelerator into the ring and keeping the betatron oscillations of the particles in the ring small, so that a substantial fraction of the injected particles were stably captured.
By 1965, using the Stanford linear accelerator as the injector, he had storage rings running with large enough circulating currents to do the first colliding-beam physics experiment. The experiment, done in collaboration with Burton Richter and others, was a measurement of electron-electron scattering at a center-of-mass energy of 600 MeV, far higher than any fixed target experiment could achieve. The results showed that electrons behave like structureless point charges down to distances of the order of 10-14 centimeters. After this demonstration that storage rings actually worked, high-energy physicists all over the world hastened to build their own.
With the benefit of hindsight, there is one serious mistake in O'Neill's 1956 letter. He grossly underestimated the possible improvement of high-vacuum techniques: He claimed that a storage ring could hold a beam with a lifetime of a few seconds. If he had said hours instead of seconds, nobody would have believed him. It took 20 years before storage rings with lifetimes measured in hours became routine. By that time, having taught the world how to do high-energy physics, O'Neill had moved on to other things. His 1968 proposal to use an electron-positron storage ring accelerator as a K-particle factory, with the energy tuned to sit exactly on the narrow phi resonance at 1020 MeV, has begun only recently to receive serious attention.
In 1965 O'Neill became a full professor at Princeton, where he remained until his retirement in 1985. He enjoyed teaching and devoted much of his time and energy to do the job well. In 1969 he was responsible for teaching Physics 103-104 the basic introductory physics courses. He decided to reform the courses radically, replacing the traditional problem exercises with "learning guides," which led the students step-by-step to a deeper understanding of what they were doing. The reform was an immediate success, and the learning guide system is still used in Princeton courses today. When O'Neill was concocting problems to put into his first learning guides, the students had recently been watching the Apollo missions on television, and so he emphasized applications of elementary physics to people and things in orbit and on the Moon. These orbital problems were popular with the students. At the end of the term, O'Neill asked the class to write a term paper about a human habitat in space, calculating the requirements of mass and energy and propulsion for a viable settlement. The students responded enthusiastically to this too.
After reading the term papers, O'Neill was infected with their enthusiasm and wrote a paper of his own, "The Colonization of Space," which was published in 1974 in Physics Today. Thereafter, space colonies remained one of his main interests. In 1978 he and his wife, Renate Steffen, founded the Space Studies Institute, a privately funded organization that supports technical research on the science and engineering of space activities. The institute successfully built a working model of a mass driver, a device invented by O'Neill for cheap and efficient movement of materials from the Moon or an asteroid into orbit.
O'Neill founded the Space Studies Institute with the intention of introducing a new style into the world of space technology. His purpose was to organize small groups of people to develop the tools of space exploration independently of governments and to prove that private groups could get things done enormously cheaper and quicker than government bureaucracies. And to bring his vision of the free expansion of mankind into space to a wider public, O'Neill wrote books. His first book, The High Frontier (William Morrow, 1977) has been translated into many languages. It established O'Neill as a spokesman for the people in many countries who believe that the settlement of space can bring tremendous benefits to humanity and that this is too important a business to be left in the hands of national governments. In 1985 the United States government recognized his status as an advocate of the private sector by inviting him to serve on the National Commission on Space.
O'Neill's third career, as an entrepreneur, began with the Geostar project in 1983 and was in full swing up to the day of his death. His final venture, the high-speed train system, which he called VSE (for velocity, silence, efficiency), was started during his last six months. The basic idea of VSE is to build a train network like a telephone network, with all trips non-stop, the stations widely distributed, and the switching system transparent to the users. Unlike other high-speed train systems, VSE is designed to outperform commercial airlines-in velocity by a factor of 5, in silence by a factor of 100, in efficiency by a factor of 10. Like other O'Neill inventions, it will have to wait a long time before the world discovers how sensible it is.
Gerard O'Neill died on 27 April 1992, after losing a seven-year battle with leukemia. He requested that the Space Studies Institute continue his efforts after his death, so that one day, people could live and work in space.
(This report grew out of a 10-week program in engineering ...)
2004(In 1969 America had proved its leadership in human spacef...)
1977There is no information about O'Neill's religious beliefs.
While teaching physics, O'Neill's interest in space travel was resurrected. He became interested in the possibility of humans surviving in outer space - even perhaps living there one day.
He started developing futuristic concepts for human space settlements, including the O'Neill cylinder, an idea for a space habitat. Gerry O'Neill first proposed the idea in the 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. He proposed that, in the 21st century, man could start building O'Neill cylinders from materials extracted from space.
The O'Neill cylinder consists of two counter-rotating cylinders. By rotating in opposite directions, they effectively cancel out each other's gyroscopic effect, making it easier to keep them aimed toward the sun. O'Neill proposed that they would each be around 20 miles long and 5 miles in diameter, connected by a bearing system at each end. He designed them to rotate, providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force. O'Neill cylinders were designed to have pressures similar to the terrestrial atmosphere. They would also use special mirrors to reflect sunlight into the cylinder in order to mimic daytime on Earth.
In May 2019, Jeff Bezos proposed constructing O'Neillian colonies when he spoke at Washington's Blue Origin event.
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill was an indefatigable worker, taking infinite trouble to get the details right. He was an effective and enthusiastic teacher. He was an accomplished showman, good at handling a crowd, and had a good rapport with ordinary people and abhorred pedants and snobs. O'Neill was uncompromisingly honest.
It was characteristic of O'Neill to combine far-reaching visions with practical work in the machine shop. All his inventions, whether in high-energy physics, space technology, or high-speed trains, were worked out in real hardware models with meticulous attention to detail. When, as usually happened, experts in the fields that O'Neill invaded raised objections to his ideas, he had always thought of the objections first and found ways to answer them. Some of his commercial ventures failed for financial and political reasons. Not one of his inventions failed for technical reasons.
Physical Characteristics: In 1985, O'Neill was diagnosed with leukemia.
Quotes from others about the person
Richard J. Pinto: "(Gerry's) brilliance, his reason, his drive, and his creativity each garnered his well-deserved renown. But I respected him most, and will remember him best, for his commitment to fairness and equity."
Kathryn D. Sullivan: "Gerry O'Neill was a man of great vision, courage, and intelligence - a type too often in short supply in this world. His dramatic and inspiring descriptions of future space colonies challenged us to confront the gap (often maddeningly wide) between technical capacity and political will. Through his research, business pursuits and educational programs, he did much to sustain our vision of a bold, space-faring future."
In June 1950, O'Neill married Sylvia Turlington. The couple had a son, Roger, and two daughters, Janet and Eleanor, before their marriage ended in divorce in 1966.
Later, O'Neill married Renate Steffen, who was 21 years younger than him. They had a son, Edward O'Neill.