Wilcox P. Overbeck was a research associate and instrumentation designer at the Chicago Met Lab. He was responsible for calling out the neutron count when Chicago Pile-1 went critical on December 2, 1942.
Before joining the Manhattan Project, Overbeck graduated from MIT with a degree in Electrical Engineering and worked as an assistant for Vannevar Bush’s Rapid Arithmetic Machine, a prototype computer. He concentrated on tube design.
After the success of CP-1, Overbeck worked for DuPont at Oak Ridge and Hanford, where he became superintendent of instrumentation. He later became the director of the Savannah River Site.