Cockcroft and Walton came together while at the Cavendish laboratory under Ernest Rutherford. In 1928, George Gamow showed that particles could tunnel through potential barriers by applying the newly available quantum mechanics. Cockcroft understood the implications of Gamow’s tunnelling theory - that a much lesser energy than earlier thought might be sufficient for a proton to penetrate the nucleus.
By 1929, they had built the Cockcroft-Walton generator, which with a system of capacitors and thermionic rectifiers could reach voltages up to 600,000 volts. It took them three more years but on April 14, 1932, the research duo bombarded a layer of lithium with hydrogen in a discharge tube that had been accelerated using their generator.
The result? The lithium broke into two helium nuclei and shot off in opposite directions - an atom had been split and nuclear transmutation of one element (lithium) to another (helium) had been achieved for the first time under human control.
Particles can create massive amounts of energy, and maybe you can too.
