Over the past few weeks, I’ve been collecting examples of Trump’s forgotten contributions to Boston’s universities, hospitals, technology startup scene — and even the Museum of Science.
No, not Donald J. Trump, the president. His paternal uncle, John G. Trump, the MIT professor and entrepreneur. John Trump lived in Winchester, but because he died forty years ago, in 1985, it’s hard to find people who knew him or remember his work.
President Trump has occasionally referenced his “super genius uncle,” who taught at MIT for “a record number of years.” Some think that the familial connection may be why MIT has not wound up directly in the federal government’s sights, in the same way that universities such as Harvard, Columbia, Cornell and Brown have. MIT, of course, is still smarting from significant reductions in federal research funding — and is suing the government to do what it can to block cuts from agencies like the National Science Foundation.
John Trump, as it happens, worked on several federally funded projects over the course of his life, including the Radiation Lab at MIT. That lab worked to perfect and deploy the radar systems that helped the Allies win World War II. Some of his work on using radiation to treat cancer was funded by the National Institutes of Health. And in the mid-1970s, Trump worked on a project to treat sewage before it entered waterways like Boston Harbor, funded by the National Science Foundation.
John Trump was born in New York City to German immigrants, and while his family hoped that he might design buildings for their growing real estate business, when he was a freshman in college, he decided to change his focus from architecture to engineering. He eventually earned a master’s degree in physics from Columbia and then a doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT.
He collaborated with another physicist to build an early kind of particle accelerator called a Van de Graaff generator. It could produce intense X-ray beams.
The two later started a company together, High Voltage Engineering Corp., with another MIT professor. It attracted funding from Georges Doriot, a Harvard Business School professor who ran one of the first venture capital funds, American Research & Development, in Boston.
High Voltage Engineering, founded in a Cambridge garage, built Van de Graaff generators and other high-end equipment that were “in increasing demand for cancer therapy, industrial radiography and nuclear particle acceleration,” according to “Creative Capital,” a book about Doriot and his venture capital firm.
Entrepreneur and MIT professor John G. Trump sits next to the compact X-ray generator he developed for cancer treatment. Circa 1950. Trump died in 1985. (Courtesy of MIT Museum)
Trump was also a key contributor to the development and deployment of radar technology to Allied forces, including for use during the D-Day invasion in 1944. He headed up the British branch of MIT’s Radiation Laboratory and worked to improve the resolution of the newly developed radar systems, which gave the Allies a strategic edge in locating bombing targets and spotting and firing on incoming enemy aircraft.
But some of Trump’s most significant research contributions before and after the war involved building and using powerful X-ray generators to deliver radiation for cancer treatments.
Trump had a close collaboration with what is now the Lahey Hospital and Medical Clinic, working to advance the use of radiation to reach deeper into the body without harming healthy tissue.
He also modified the device to treat skin cancers and taught courses for hospital physicists throughout the Northeast about how to use the technology. During his lifetime, more than 10,000 patients were treated at Lahey, and in his High Voltage Research Lab at MIT, according to an obituary published by the National Academy of Engineering.
“He had a rich career at MIT, and was as different [from] his brother Fred and his nephew Donald as you can imagine,” says O. Robert Simha, 93, a retired director of planning at MIT who collaborated with John Trump to build one of his labs on campus. “He was thoughtful, kind, polite, understanding, and cooperative as one could hope for.”
The admiration President Trump has expressed for his late uncle is “probably to our advantage,” Simha says. “He’s not attacking MIT directly.”
If you have spent time in the Boston area, my bet is that you have seen some of the traces of John Trump here — perhaps without even realizing it.
There is a John G. Trump building at the Lahey Hospital campus in Burlington, which currently houses Lahey’s outpatient behavioral health and psychiatry departments, according to spokeswoman Sonya Vartabedian.
A recently established John G. Trump Fund for Innovation in Diagnostic Radiology“ will be used to support promising new technologies or applications that enhance and complement diagnostic radiology techniques,” she writes via email.
Trump was chairman of Lahey’s board of trustees from 1974 to 1985.
On MIT’s campus, his former research lab is still standing, right on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, just across the street from the university’s nuclear reactor.
And at the Museum of Science, where Trump was also a life trustee, there’s a plaque honoring his contributions. It’s right near the museum’s Theater of Electricity, which features a large Van de Graaf generator that Trump helped build and install. The theater’s “Lightning!” show is on hiatus now because of construction, but museum spokesperson Meaghan Agnew expects it to return sometime in June.
John Trump “never promoted himself in any way,” says Bob Wenstrup, 87, who worked with him as a medical physicist at MIT and Lahey. Wenstrup remembers Trump going to Washington, D.C., to receive an important award, but not telling his colleagues, who learned about it by reading the next day’s newspaper.
Trump was “a man who had made enormous contributions in every area he worked in,” Wenstrup said. “It’s simply unbelievable how much he did.”
Wenstrup is not a fan of John Trump’s nephew, the president.
“He resents people who are intelligent,” Wenstrup said, but he “uses John Trump as an indication of how extraordinary he is himself.”
Wenstrup has clear memories of attending John Trump’s funeral in February 1985 and meeting Fred Trump there, the president’s father. But he doesn’t recall encountering Donald Trump there.
