Skidmore
Lifestyle
Celebrating Willis Whitfield: The Local Physicist Whose Clean Room Innovation Continues to Impact the World
Willis Whitfield, a physicist at Sandia, was born and raised on a cotton farm in West Texas. His upbringing instilled in him the importance of hard work and problem-solving. These skills later led him to invent the advanced clean room technology still used today. In 1959, Whitfield joined a Sandia team to solve a problem affecting the manufacturing of complex parts, including nuclear weapons components. The issue was that these parts were malfunctioning due to particulate contamination.
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