Benjamin Abeles

Benjamin Abeles (1925 –2020) was an Austrian-Czech physicist whose research in the 1960s in the US on germanium–silicon alloys led to the technology used to power space probes such as the Voyager spacecraft.

He grew up in Austria and Czechoslovakia and arrived in the UK in 1939 on one of the Kindertransport missions. In July 1939, aged 14, he was one of hundreds of Jewish children brought from Prague to London through the efforts of British humanitarian Nicholas Winton, an example of the various Kindertransport missions that saved many such children from the impending dangers of World War II and the Holocaust. His parents and older sister were killed in the Holocaust.

He completed his education after the war in Czechoslovakia and Israel (from 1949), obtaining a doctorate in physics. He then lived and worked as a research physicist in the US and retired in 1995. His honours include the 1979 Stuart Ballantine Medal and his induction into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame (1991).