Obituary of Ira Lon Morgan

Dr. Ira Lon Morgan, one of the pioneers in accelerator nuclear physics, died Thursday, June 30, 2005 in Austin, Texas.

Lon was born August 3, 1926 in Fort Worth , Texas. He graduated from Texarkana TX High School in 1943. After high school he joined the US Naval Air Corps and served in the Pacific Theater. On August 7, 1948 he married Mary Esther Massey. After his service he entered the physics program at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth , Texas and received his Bachelor degree in 1949 and Masters in 1951. He then entered the PhD Nuclear Physics program at the University of Texas Austin and received his PhD in 1954. After graduation he stayed on at the Balcones Nuclear Laboratory at UT Austin as a post doctoral appointment under the sponsorship of the Department of Energy which at the time was called the Atomic Energy Commission. While there he constructed the first Van de Graaff accelerator at UT Austin.

After his post doctoral appointment he and three friends who were also associated with the university, formed Texas Nuclear Corporation. He was named Vice President and Director of Research for the company and held that position from 1956-1961. During this period he was the first commercial investigator in the U.S. to receive a grant from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to study nuclear structure by means of neutron elastic and inelastic scattering experiments on the wide variety of isotopes of interest to the AEC. These experiments were done using a 3 MeV single ended Van de Graaff accelerator that the company bought and reconfigured for the experiments. His company also manufactured a Cockcroft-Walton accelerator that was used by universities and industry to study sub critical reactors, activation analysis with 14 MeV neutrons from the T(d,n) 4 He reaction and nuclear cross sections. One hundred and sixty of these machines were sold on a world market. These machines are also used for nuclear physics, isotope production, neutron pulsed sub critical assembly and radiation effects measurements. In 1965 Nuclear-Chicago bought Texas Nuclear Corp. and Lon joined Nuclear-Chicago as Vice President until 1968. In 1968 he returned to academia and became a professor of physics and director of the Center for Nuclear Studies at the University of Texas at Austin . He directed the center until 1976. The center was well funded for its time and supported the research of 63 faculty, staff and graduate students. The laboratory had a 4 MeV and a 6 MeV single ended Van de Graaff injecting into a 12 MeV tandem producing 18 MeV. With the coupled system it was possible to accelerate multiple charged ions to 72 MeV. From 1987 – 1997 he was Executive Director of the North Texas Research Institute at the University of North Texas . In his academic and scientific career he published 120 peer reviewed papers in nuclear physics and 13 patents on nuclear apparatus. He was named an APS fellow and also a fellow in the American Nuclear Society. Lon was clearly one of the early scientific entrepreneurs. In addition to Texas Nuclear Corp., he started and was the president of four more scientific companies. These were: Columbia Scientific Corp., Scientific Measurements Systems Corp., Integrated Digital Modeling Corp. and Advanced Molecular Imaging Systems.

He was also involved in a host of high level civic activities in Austin . In 1967 he was president of the Austin Chamber of Commerce. During his presidency he was instrumental in convincing IBM to build a large plant in North Austin . Shortly after IBM came to Austin , Motorola and Westinghouse followed. The rapid growth of Austin ‘s industries after these companies came is a matter of record.

After his PhD, Lon was also very much involved with the APS Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP). In fact, he was very influential in the success of the division. He hosted one of the early divisional meetings in Austin in the late 1960’s and was the sole financial sponsor of the meeting. He also helped initiate and fund the prestigious Bonnor prize that DNP awards for Nuclear Physics.

Lon and his wife, Mary, have set up scholarship funds for Physics departments at Texas Christian University , University of North Texas and the University of Texas ( Austin ).

In 1974 Lon joined me as co-director of the International Conference on the Application of Accelerators in Research and Industry (CAARI). Because of Lon’s input the conference grew from around 250 to 400 participants and finally to over 900. He co-chaired this bi-annual conference from 1974 to 2002. It varies from year to year but CAARI has had at times the largest number of invited speakers of any APS conference.

On a personal note, it was a pleasure to work with this great man for all those years. He will be greatly missed by all of his friends throughout the world.