A. Lincoln Read was one of the first physicists hired to help launch the U.S. government’s Fermilab particle physics and accelerator laboratory near Batavia, and held important roles at the lab for 38 years.
Read was tapped by Fermilab’s first director, Robert R. Wilson, to build the research effort at Fermilab, and he later was Fermilab’s first head of safety.
“While safety was important to the lab, it wasn’t real high on the visibility list of management, and Linc tried to be sure that it received the visibility and importance necessary to achieve a good safety record,” said retired Fermilab Chief Operating Officer Bruce Chrisman.
Read, 86, died of complications from tongue cancer Dec. 27 at his home, said his wife, Patricia. He had been a longtime Wheaton resident.
Born Anthony Lincoln Read in Newton Abbot, a town in southwest England, Read earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from University College London in 1960.
Read was a research associate and then an assistant scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York from 1960 until 1965. He then taught physics from 1965 until 1968 at Cornell University, where he worked with Wilson.
In 1967, Wilson took a leave of absence from his teaching job at Cornell to become director of what would become Fermilab. Wilson recruited his colleague Read to join him, and Read signed on as a scientist at Fermilab, where he was the fifth employee hired.
Wilson was tasked with completing the laboratory’s particle accelerator, which would have a four-mile circumference, and building out the laboratory’s infrastructure, including its office building. Wilson put Read in charge of overseeing the research function.
“Bob Wilson gave (Read) really lots of high-visibility jobs,” Chrisman said. “Early on, Bob never wanted people to stay in the same job for long, because he didn’t want fiefdoms built up. So people were transferring around fairly regularly. Linc was initially responsible for building out the research areas, while Bob was more designing the accelerator and getting the accelerator to work, so he handed off to Linc the job of getting the other part of the lab working.”
In the early 1970s, Read worked in the lab’s proton area, on its E-70 experiment, which later was renamed E-288 and which was led by future lab director and future Nobel laureate Leon M. Lederman. That project helped discover an elementary particle called the bottom quark.
Roy Rubinstein, a retired physicist at Fermilab, recalled that Read “would work like crazy.”
In 1978, Read was named the first head of safety at Fermilab, overseeing its environmental, health and safety activities. He held that role until 1982.
In 1981, Read was active in local Boy Scouts, park district and church activities but a political novice when he successfully ran for a seat on the Wheaton City Council. He defeated Donald Maxwell, a future mayor and future councilman who was aligned with and running with others who were part of the council’s majority political bloc at that time. In an interview after the election, Read told the Wheaton Daily Journal newspaper that the fact that Maxwell had run with a political ally strengthened his “conviction that people in Wheaton have the impression there is an inbred political machine that controls who gets nominated and who gets elected.”
Read built a reputation as an independent-minded lawmaker. He resigned his council seat in 1983 to take a post working for Fermilab’s owner, the U.S. Department of Energy, on the East Coast. Three years later, he returned to Fermilab, where he continued doing research.
“He cared about the lab and its history. He wanted the lab to be remembered and recognized for its important contributions to international high-energy physics, as did all of the employees in that generation that helped Robert R. Wilson found Fermilab and build (it) into the highest-energy accelerator in the world from 1972 until 2011,” said retired Fermilab archivist Adrienne Kolb. “Linc excelled at sharing his enthusiasm for physics and Fermilab with young and old.”
A first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Read is survived by three sons, Alexander, Andrew and Gordon; two daughters, Janet and Alison; two stepsons, Stephen and Jason Kettlestrings; two brothers, Gordon and Graham; a sister, Joy Carpenter; 12 grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren;
A memorial service is scheduled for noon to 3 p.m. April 27 at Williams-Kampp Funeral Home, 430 E. Roosevelt Road, Wheaton.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
