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Joseph Laws McKibben (1912 – 2001) was an American physicist and engineer who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer as a group leader on the Manhattan Project. He personally witnessed the Trinity test and flipped the switch that set off the atomic bomb at Trinity. McKibben, motivated by his daughter Karan's paralysed hands due to polio, also invented the Air Muscle in 1957.

He was born in 1912 in Missouri. He died in 2001 in Los Alamos, aged 89.

References

1. "Manhattan District History, Project Y, The Los Alamos Project" (PDF). U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
2. "Joe McKibben, Scientist, Trinity Site, Los Alamos, NM, Manhattan Project Veteran, Scientist, Trinity Test Eyewitness". Atomic Heritage Foundation.
3. Gurstelle, William (21 May 2015). "Making a Simple Air Muscle - A father's love inspired this A-bomb maker to invent a pneumatic actuator that's used in robots today". Makezine. Santa Rosa, California, USA: Make.co. Retrieved 4 April 2020.
4. Gurstelle, William (1 Feb 2017). ReMaking History, Volume 3: Makers of the Modern World. Canada: Maker Media, Inc., 1160. p. Chapter 9, Joseph McKibben and the Air Muscle. ISBN 9781680450682.
5. "Joseph Laws McKibben". PeopleLegacy.com.

External links

• http://cyberneticzoo.com/bionics/1957-artificial-muscle-joseph-laws-mckibben-american/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/06/29/the-sweet-sin-of-the-atomic-city/9c9752cb-324a-45cf-a948-2ab5528f8fee/
• https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/03/us/for-45-scientists-a-revisiting-of-site-of-first-atomic-blast.html
• https://www.abqjournal.com/trinity/trinity1.htm
• https://naturalphilosophy.org/home/member/?memberid=256&subpage=about
• https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/photos/mckibben-joseph-d1
• https://billiongraves.com/grave/Joseph-Laws-McKibben/9720563?referrer=myheritage
• https://peoplelegacy.com/joseph_laws_mckibben-271p2.

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Timeline
Sites	Ames Berkeley Chicago (Site A) Dayton Hanford Inyokern Los Alamos Montreal New York Oak Ridge Salt Wells Pilot Plant Trinity Wendover Heavy water sites
Administrators	Vannevar Bush Arthur Compton James B. Conant Priscilla Duffield Thomas Farrell Leslie Groves John Lansdale Ernest Lawrence James Marshall Franklin Matthias Dorothy McKibbin Kenneth Nichols Robert Oppenheimer Deak Parsons Boris Pash William Purnell Frank Spedding Charles Thomas Paul Tibbets Bud Uanna Harold Urey Stafford Warren Ed Westcott Roscoe Wilson
Scientists	Luis Alvarez Robert Bacher Hans Bethe Aage Bohr Niels Bohr Norris Bradbury James Chadwick John Cockcroft Charles Critchfield Harry Daghlian John R. Dunning Enrico Fermi Richard Feynman Val Fitch James Franck Klaus Fuchs Maria Goeppert Mayer George Kistiakowsky George Koval Willard Libby Edwin McMillan Mark Oliphant George B. Pegram Norman Ramsey Jr. Isidor Isaac Rabi James Rainwater Bruno Rossi Glenn Seaborg Emilio Segrè Louis Slotin Henry DeWolf Smyth Leo Szilard Edward Teller Stanisław Ulam John von Neumann John Wheeler Eugene Wigner Robert Wilson Leona Woods Chien-Shiung Wu
Operations	Alsos Mission Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Operation Crossroads Operation Peppermint Project Alberta Silverplate 509th Composite Group Enola Gay Bockscar The Great Artiste
Weapons	Fat Man Little Boy Pumpkin bomb Thin Man
Related topics	African Americans Atomic Energy Act of 1946 Bismuth phosphate process British contribution Calutron Girls Chicago Pile-1 Demon core Einstein–Szilard letter Franck Report Interim Committee K-25 Project Los Alamos Primer Nobel Prize laureates Oppenheimer security hearing Plutonium Quebec Agreement RaLa Experiment S-1 Executive Committee S-50 Project Smyth Report Uranium X-10 Graphite Reactor Y-12 Project
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