Ernest Walton was an Irish physicist best known for being one of the first scientists to artificially split the atom. Alongside John Cockcroft, he built the first successful particle accelerator, often called the "Cockcroft-Walton generator," in the early 1930s. In 1932, their experiment bombarded lithium with accelerated protons, resulting in the first human-induced nuclear reaction. Walton's work demonstrated that enormous amounts of energy could be released by splitting atomic nuclei.