Wilson’s Princeton team developed the isotron, a proposed device for separating uranium isotopes.
The project arose during the early Manhattan Project search for ways to enrich uranium-235, the fissile isotope needed for an atomic bomb. Robert R. Wilson’s Princeton group pursued an electromagnetic method different from Ernest Lawrence’s calutron, which was being developed at the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory.
The isotron used high-voltage electrical fields and the principle of a klystron-like arrangement to separate ions according to their masses. In theory, it could be much more efficient than the calutron. Richard Feynman and Paul Olum worked on assessing whether the design could be made practical and helped analyze the project’s experimental results.
The device produced small samples showing partial separation, but the process did not prove competitive or sufficiently practical. On Lawrence’s recommendation, the Princeton isotron project was abandoned, and Wilson’s group moved on to wartime work at Los Alamos. The calutron therefore became the better-known uranium-separation machine, but it was not Wilson’s Princeton invention.