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Building upon the nuclear transmutation experiments by Ernest Rutherford, carried out several years earlier, the laboratory fusion of heavy hydrogen isotopes was first accomplished by Mark Oliphant in 1932
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steps of the main cycle of nuclear fusion in stars were worked out by Hans Bethe. Research into fusion for military purposes began in the early 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project,
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Research into developing controlled thermonuclear fusion for civil purposes also began in earnest in the 1950s
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A new approach was outlined in the theoretical works fulfilled in 1950–1951 by I.E. Tamm and A.D. Sakharov in the Soviet Union, which first discussed a tokamak-like approach
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The U.S. fusion program began in 1951 when Lyman Spitzer began work on a stellarator under the code name Project Matterhorn.
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nuclear fusion on a large scale in an explosion was first carried out on November 1, 1952, in the Ivy Mike hydrogen bomb test.
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In 1954, Edward Teller held a gathering of fusion researchers at the Princeton Gun Club
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Experimental research on these designs began in 1956 at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow by a group of Soviet scientists led by Lev Artsimovich
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The technique of implosion of a microcapsule irradiated by laser beams, the basis of laser inertial confinement, was first suggested in 1962 by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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The group constructed the first tokamaks, the most successful being the T-3 and its larger version T-4. T-4 was tested in 1968 in Novosibirsk
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Through the 1970s and 80s great strides in understanding the tokamak system were made
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Recent work on the basic concept started as a result of the appearance of the "wires array" concept in the 1980s
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Muon-catalyzed fusion is a well-established and reproducible fusion process that occurs at ordinary temperatures. It was studied in detail by Steven Jones in the early 1980s. It has not been reported to produce net energy.
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Pyroelectric fusion was reported in April 2005 by a team at UCLA.
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In 2010, more than 60 years after the first attempts, commercial power production is still believed to be unlikely before 2050.[3]
