, having sketched the
Van Allen radiation belts 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. He remained in Greece during World War II, working for an
Athens elevator maintenance company during the German occupation. He later initiated his own elevator company. During all of this, he maintained an amateur interest in
accelerator physics and high-energy
particle physics, and studied German and American texts concerning the subjects extensively. During 1946 he independently developed ideas for a
synchrotron and in 1949 he conceived the
strong-focusing principle for particle accelerators. Rather than publishing in a journal he submitted a patent application in the US and Greece. His discovery was 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 Brookhaven National Laboratory (
BNL),
Cornell University and
CERN. Christofilos was offered a job at Brookhaven in 1953. In 1956 he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (
LLNL) to continue his work on the
Astron, a proposed
fusion reactor planned during
Project Sherwood. At LLNL, Christofilos worked on a number of military projects. He became a member of the
JASON Defense Advisory Group and was the principal researcher for
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. In 1958 Christofilos proposed
Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) 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 ELF frequencies. His ideas were implemented by the U.S. Navy as
Project Seafarer, which constructed huge ELF 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 U.S. nuclear submarines. , Christofilos, and Eugene Laurer in front of the
Astron (fusion reactor) In 1963 he was awarded the
Elliott Cresson Medal.
Herbert York described Christofilos as follows: :Nick was a remarkable idea man. The ideas were usually not good, but they were really remarkable in that they were the kind of ideas that nobody else had. Nick really was a genius in a very important sense -- he often invented things that required two new ideas simultaneously, which is something that normally, hardly anyone ever does. ==References==