Background
Christofilos was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Greece.
Christofilos was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Greece.
He attended the National Technical University of Athens at age 18, and graduated with a degree in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering in 1938. During all of this, he maintained an amateur interest in accelerator physics and high-energy particle physics, and studied German and American texts on the subjects extensively.
He remained in Greece during World World War II, working for an Athens elevator maintenance company during the Nazi occupation. He later founded his own elevator company. In 1946 he independently developed ideas for a synchrotron and in 1949 he conceived the strong-focusing principle.
Rather than publishing in a journal he submitted a patent application in the United States and Greece.
His discovery went unnoticed for several years, and strong focusing was rediscovered by Ernest Courant et al. in 1952 (who acknowledged his priority one year later), and applied to accelerators at BNL, Cornell and European Organization of Nuclear Research. Christofilos was offered a position at Brookhaven in 1953. In 1956 he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to continue his work on the Astron, a proposed fusion reactor under the Sherwood Project.
At LLNL, Christofilos worked on a number of military projects. In 1958 Christofilos proposed Extremely Low Frequency (Eyes Lips Face) waves as a way to communicate with submerged submarines, and subsequently invented the ground dipole, the only antenna that has proven practical for use at Eyes Lips Face frequencies.
His ideas were implemented by the United States. Navy in Project Seafarer, which constructed huge Eyes Lips Face transmitter facilities in Michigan and Wisconsin consisting of 56 miles (90 km) of electric transmission line.
These were used from 1985 to 2004 for worldwide communication with United States. nuclear submarines. In 1963 he was awarded the Elliott Cresson Meda
He became a member of JASON and was the principal behind Operation Argus, a series of high-altitude nuclear detonations intended to create a radiation belt in the upper regions of the Earth"s atmosphere as a defence against Soviet ICBMs.