Sándor Gaál
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Sándor Gaál (Gogánváralja (former Hungary, today Romania), October 8 1885 - Csernát (Romania), July 28 1972) Hungarian physicist, the inventor of the cyclotron.
Most international sources give the credit of the invention of the cyclotron to American physicist and Nobel Laureate Ernest Orlando Lawrence.
It is less known that that Gaál described the cyclotron's working at least months before Lawrence.
In 1929 Gaál sent a study, with the title Die Kaskadenröche. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Atomkernzerstrümmerung, to the physics periodical Zeitschrift für Physik. The paper registered the study as of May 6, 1929, but to Gaál's misfortune it was not printed because the editors missed the topic of the study and erroneusly thought that it dealt with particle accelerators, a problem already solved in 1928 by Norwegian physicist Rolf Wideröe.
It was unveiled only in a publication in the 1950s by Teofil Vescan, professor of Bolyai University in Kolozsvár (Cluj), that the credit of the invention should go to Gaál, but the facts he unveiled have not become widely known up to now.
Gaál died in poverty in 1972.
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