Jackson Oswalt Built a Nuclear Reactor in His Bedroom at the Age of 12

Your average 12 year old is spending their days on TikTok, hanging out with friends, and hopefully doing at least some amount of homework. For Jackson Oswalt, though, those activities were maybe a little bit too pedestrian.

Jackson, who is likely one of the few 12-year-olds in the country to have their home raided by the FBI because of what they are up to, was a bit of a scientific prodigy.

His home was raided back in 2018. Here's what we know about what he did that got the FBI's attention.

At just 12 years old, Jackson achieved nuclear fusion in the playroom of his house in Memphis, Tenn. He built the machine using customized vacuums, pumps, and chambers that were purchased by his parents via eBay and cost a total of $10,000.

He is now in the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest person to achieve nuclear fusion.

"One day I had a sudden epiphany," he wrote in fusor.net (per Guinness World Records). "I realized that I could be the absolute best at whatever video game, but in the end, it still wouldn't mean much. I realized that, in the grand scheme of things, video games had no role to play. So, I changed my ways. Immediately, I switched to the closest thing to video games in real life: science. At the time, all I knew was that I wanted to be smart. That was it. I just wanted to be smart."

"So, instead of watching people play videogames, I would watch physics videos," he continued. "This led to my discovery of a boy named Taylor Wilson, who had built a reactor at 14 years of age. When I saw it, I just laughed. I thought that it was the easiest way to get on to the news. Boy was I wrong. Eventually, I just couldn't resist the temptation of building a reactor of my own. So, at 11 years old I set out to do it."

Since building a nuclear fusion machine at just 12 years old, Jackson has continued to prove that he's a pretty smart guy. He now works a Midjourney, an AI company that also does work on a variety of other computing research questions.

"Currently, I'm building new physical computing interfaces at Midjourney," he wrote on his website.

He previously founded a startup called Contextual Computing, according to that same website, so it's clear that he's still innovating in surprising and interesting ways. He was born in 2005, which means that he's only now just 20 years old, and probably a prodigy as a result.

He posts occasionally on Twitter, although his posts are largely about his work with Midjourney and his move to San Francisco. While he hasn't built any other reactors in the years since his first innovation, it's fair to say that his work on nuclear physics suggested that he was a pretty smart kid.