Wilcox Pratt Overbeck (1912–1980) was an electrical and nuclear engineer who built instrumentation for the first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and went on to work at other United States Department of Energy national laboratories. He previously worked with Vannevar Bush at MIT on the Rapid Arithmetic Machine.
A one-hot ring counter is sometimes referred to as an "Overbeck ring";"RAMAC 305", IBM Customer Engineering Manual of Instruction (1959)Technical Education Program Series, United States. Division of Vocational and Technical Education, 1960, p. 52 he patented such a device made with a multi-anode vacuum tube in 1943."Electronic switching device", Wilcox P. Overbeck's US Patent No. 2427533, filed in 1943 At the Met Lab in Chicago, he used such counters to scale the rate of detected ionization events, to estimate the rate of the nuclear reaction in the Chicago Pile-1, Enrico Fermi's famous first critical nuclear reactor.
References
Wilcox Pratt Overbeck c1912–1980 at Harvard Wilcox P. Overbeck at Atomic Heritage Foundation