Ernest Walton

Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton was an Irish experimental physicist. With John Cockcroft at Cambridge University in the early 1930s, he built an early particle accelerator, the Cockcroft-Walton generator, and used it to split lithium nuclei by bombarding them with accelerated protons, the first time a nuclear transmutation was produced by means entirely under human control. He shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics with Cockcroft.