The second half of the 20th century exploited this theory in an attempt to reproduce the power of the Sun in a controlled manner on Earth. These experiments, initially in closely guarded, secret national programmes, have evolved into the major international collaborations that we see today.
The first fusion experiments were conducted in the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, UK, during the 1930's but results led the eminent scientist Lord Rutherford to pronounce in 1933 that "anyone who looks for a source of power in the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine." However after World War II and the technical success of the Manhattan project that developed the first nuclear weapons, an increased interest in atomic physics and fusion in particular was seen.
There was serious interest in the peaceful use of fusion physics all around the world. In fact, in 1951 scientists in Argentina claimed to have controlled the release of nuclear fusion energy. These claims proved to be false but they acted as a spur to many other research groups.
The Zeta device
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"65","attributes":{"class":"media-image","style":"float: left;","typeof":"foaf:Image"}}]]In the UK, much of the early work on fusion was undertaken by universities, principally Sir George Thomson´s group at Imperial College and Peter Thonemann´s team at Oxford, before being centered respectively at Harwell and Aldermaston. Sir George Thomson even developed a patent for a fusion reactor. In 1952 Cousins and Ware built a small toroidal pinch device, but the original large-scale experimental fusion device on which most British fusion physicists worked during the 1940s and 50s was housed in a hangar at Harwell and called the Zero Energy Toroidal Assembly (ZETA). ZETA was a stabilized toroidal pinch device and worked from 1954 until 1958 giving results that showed initial promise and gave clues to later larger devices.
In the US, Lyman Spitzer started the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory working on a magnetic confinement device called a stellarator. James Tuck, a British physicist, began work at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on magnetic pinch devices and Edward Teller expanded work on the hydrogen bomb at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to include inertial confinement techniques.