The story of Astron is more about a person than about a fusion concept [50]. Nick Christofilos was a self-made Greek physicist who independently co-invented the alternating-gradient focusing principle for accelerators and later the Astron machine. Since he was a Greek citizen working on US-classified material, he was not allowed to access his own work once it had been filed away. The Astron was a very large machine at Livermore which was to produce an FRC (Fig. 10.33) with a ring of relativistic electrons injected from an induction linac of his own design. Accumulating the electron layer from multiple pulses was not successful, and only 6% field reversal was attained. Meanwhile, Hans Fleischmann at Cornell achieved 100% field reversal using pulsed power. Without sufficient understanding, Christofilos also did not realize that the electrons would lose their energy by syn­chrotron radiation. But his persuasiveness finally gave way to reason, and the Atomic Energy Commission prepared to shut down the project. Before this hap­pened, however, Christofilos, a hard-driving, hard-drinking smoker, died of a heart attack at 55 in 1972.