Born in
Brevard, North Carolina, McDaniel attended Chesterville High School in
Ohio. After graduating in 1933, he attended
Ohio Wesleyan University, from which he graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Science. His initial postgraduate studies took place at the
Case School of Applied Science, graduating with a master's degree in 1940. After the outbreak of
World War II, McDaniel joined Bacher in
Los Alamos, New Mexico to work for the
Manhattan Project, where he became a part of
Robert R. Wilson's
cyclotron research team. McDaniel is also noted as having performed the final check on the first atomic bomb prior to its detonation in the
Trinity test. He was a co-founder of Cornell's Laboratory for Nuclear Studies (LNS) and had helped create the 300 megavolt (MeV) electron
synchrotron, one of the first such accelerators in the world. He and Wilson, who was McDaniel's predecessor as director of LNS, built three more electron synchrotrons of 1
GeV, 2 GeV, and 10 GeV, each of which enabled physicists to study phenomena in a new energy range. He was a
Fulbright research fellow in 1953 at the
Australian National University and a
Guggenheim fellow in 1959 at the University of Rome. Wilson and McDaniel continued to collaborate at Cornell until Wilson left to head
Fermilab in
Batavia, Illinois in 1967. In 1972, Wilson invited McDaniel to serve as acting head of the accelerator section at Fermilab, and McDanield took a one-year leave of absence from Cornell. Though the Fermilab accelerator had been placed into operation, it suffered from frequent component failures. When McDaniel left eight months later, he led the effort which increased the power of Fermilab's accelerator from 20 GeV to 300 GeV and its beam density by a factor of 1000. Of McDaniel's contribution to Fermilab, Wilson said, "This bravura performance demonstrated Mac’s skill for leadership as well as his celebrated sixth sense for finding sources of trouble and fixing them.” Upon returning to Cornell in 1974, McDaniel proposed upgrading the then existing 10 GeV synchrotron with an 8 GeV electron-positron storage ring, which would greatly increase the energy of particle collisions when the particles in the storage ring hit the particles traveling in the opposite direction in the synchrotron. When constructed in 1979, the
Cornell Electron Storage Ring became the world's primary source of information about one of the fundamental building blocks of matter, the
b-quark. After the end of particle physics experiments 20 years later, CESR is now used as a test facility of damping rings for a future
international linear collider. In 1981, McDaniel developed a proposal for a new mile-diameter electron-positron collider called CESR II, but could not obtain the necessary $200 million in funding for it. In 1988, McDaniel was Visiting Distinguished Professor at
Arizona State University.
Sexual harassment allegation In 1975, 11 years before the
Supreme Court decision in
Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson recognized
sexual harassment as a violation of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964,
Carmita Dickerson Wood, an administrative assistant to McDaniel, quit her job after years of alleged sexual harassment by McDaniel, bringing her case to
Lin Farley and the
Working Women United organization which Farley chaired. Wood was denied unemployment benefits by Cornell after having cited "personal reasons" as the cause of her departure. She was later placed in another job on Cornell's campus. No formal investigation into the allegations was conducted, and McDaniel was not formally investigated by Cornell nor reprimanded. Nevertheless, the incident contributed to a surge in interest in workplace sexual harassment which culminated in the 1986 decision. ==Honors==