John Wistar Simpson
American electrical engineer
John Wistar Simpson (25 September 1914 – January 4, 2007) was an electrical engineer, who made significant contributions to the development of the nuclear energy.
Biography
He was born in 1914 in Glenn Springs, South Carolina. He joined Westinghouse in 1937 and, earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 1941. He was a close associate of Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, known as the father of the nuclear Navy.
Simpson took a two-year leave of absence from Westinghouse in 1946 to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where they applied nuclear energy to the generation of power. When he returned to Westinghouse he became responsible for research and development of nuclear energy generation at the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory. He was deeply involved in the design and construction of the first submarine atomic power plant in the USS Nautilus (SSN-571). In the late 1950s, he organized the Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory, with a federal contract to build a nuclear thermal rocket. It was successfully tested, but sidelined by NASA’s Gemini program.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6264676. VIAF identifies the subject as 65705772. The Library of Congress control number is n94093341. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914, 2007, 1937 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Wistar Simpson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.