at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell. Tuck studied the Thomson-Blackman work and concluded that they would not reach fusion condition, but would nevertheless be interesting as an experimental system. Working at the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University, he arranged funding for an experimental device and started assembling it. Before it was complete, he was lured to the US by a job offer at the University of Chicago (Illinois). Other teams in the UK continued their efforts. Thomson passed his concepts on to Stanley (Stan) W. Cousins and Alan Alfred Ware (1924-2010), who assembled a linear pinch device using old radar equipment, and started operations in 1947. Follow-on experiments used large banks of capacitors to store energy that was quickly dumped into the plasma through a solenoid wrapped around a short tube. These experiments demonstrated a number of dynamic instabilities that caused the plasma to break up and hit the walls of the tube long before it was compressed or heated enough to reach the required fusion conditions. After a short time in Chicago, Tuck was hired by Los Alamos to work on the "Super" project (the hydrogen bomb), where he was put on the task of calculating the nuclear cross section of the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction. This work continued to pique his interest in fusion power, and he spent some time through 1951 considering the problem. At Los Alamos, Tuck acquainted the US researchers with the British efforts. By this point Lyman Spitzer had introduced his stellarator concept and was talking the idea around the energy establishment, seeking funding. In 1951 he approached the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to fund his design. Tuck was skeptical of Spitzer's enthusiasm and felt his aggressive development program was "incredibly ambitious". Tuck proposed a much less-aggressive program based on pinch. Both men presented their ideas in Washington, D.C. in May 1951. In July, Spitzer received $50,000, and Tuck was sent away without funding. Not to be outdone, Tuck convinced Norris Bradbury, the Los Alamos director, to give him $50,000 from the discretionary budget, using it to build the Perhapsatron. Still unconvinced that the concept would work on the first attempt, he called this approach, with Stanislaw Ulam's input, the Perhapsatron. Tuck assembled a small team, and using scrounged parts, built the first Perhapsatron in 1952/53. The Perhapsatron used a toroidal tube made in the local glass shop. In the middle of the