Ernest O. Lawrence - National Academy of Sciencesnasonline.org/.../memoir-pdfs/lawrence-ernest.pdf · ERNEST ORLANDO LAWRENCE 253 At Minnesota, Lawrence came under the influence of

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

ERNEST ORLANDO LAWRENCE

1901 - 1958

A B i o g r a p h i c a l M e m o i r b y

L U I S W . A L V A R E Z

Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the views of the

National Academy of Sciences

Biographical Memoir

COPYRIGHT 1970

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

WASHINGTON D.C.

ERNEST ORLANDO LAWRENCE

August 1,1901-August 27,1958

BY LUIS W. ALVAREZ

IN HIS RELATIVELY short life of fifty-seven years, Ernest Or-lando Lawrence accomplished more than one might be-

lieve possible in a life twice as long. The important ingredientsof his success were native ingenuity and basic good judgment inscience, great stamina, an enthusiastic and outgoing personality,and a sense of integrity that was overwhelming.

Many articles on the life and accomplishments of ErnestLawrence have been published, and George Herbert Childshas written a book-length biography. This biographical mem-oir, however, has not made use of any sources other than theauthor's memory of Ernest Lawrence and things learned fromLawrence himself. A more balanced picture will emerge whenHerbert Childs's biography is published; this sketch simplyshows how Ernest Lawrence looked to one of his many friends.

Lawrence was born in Canton, South Dakota, where hisfather was superintendent of schools. When Lawrence was aboy, his constant companion was Merle Tuve, who went on toestablish a reputation for scientific ingenuity and daring, muchlike that of his boyhood chum. Together, Lawrence and Tuvebuilt and flew gliders, and they collaborated in the constructionof a very early short-wave radio transmitting station. This ex-perience can be seen reflected in their later work—Lawrence

252 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

was the first man to accelerate particles to high energy by theapplication of short-wave radio techniques, and Tuve, withBreit, was the first to reflect short-wave radio pulses from theionosphere, a technique that led directly to the development ofradar. In the early thirties, Lawrence and Tuve were leaders oftwo energetic teams of nuclear physicists. Lawrence with hiscyclotron, and Tuve with his electrostatic accelerator, carriedthe friendly rivalry of their boyhood days into the formativestages of American nuclear physics, and all nuclear physicistshave benefited greatly from the results.

Lawrence began his college work at St. Olaf's in Northfield,Minnesota, and then went to the University of South Dakotafor his B.S. degree. He worked his way through college by sell-ing kitchenware to farmers' wives in the surrounding counties.Very few of the scientific colleagues who admired his effective-ness in selling new scientific projects to foundation presidentsand government agencies knew that he had served an appren-ticeship in practical salesmanship many years before. But itwould be quite wrong to attribute his later successes in thisfield to any early training. It was always obvious that he con-vinced his listeners by an infectious enthusiasm, born of a sin-cere belief that his ideas were sound and should be supportedin the best interests of science and the country.

Although Lawrence started his college career as a premed-ical student, he switched to physics under the guidance of thetalented teacher one so often finds in the background of afamous scientist's career. In Lawrence's case, this role wasplayed by Dean Lewis E. Akeley, who tutored him privatelyand sent him on to the University of Minnesota as a graduatestudent. On the wall of Lawrence's office, Dean Akeley's pic-ture always had the place of honor in a gallery that includedphotographs of Lawrence's scientific heroes: Arthur Compton,Niels Bohr, and Ernest Rutherford.

ERNEST ORLANDO LAWRENCE 253

At Minnesota, Lawrence came under the influence of Pro-fessor W. F. G. Swann, and when Swann moved to Chicago andthen went on to Yale, Lawrence moved both times with him.Lawrence received his Ph.D. degree at Yale, in 1925, and re-mained there three years more, first as a National ResearchFellow, and finally as an assistant professor. From this periodof his formal training in physics, very little remained on thesurface in his later years. To most of his colleagues, Lawrenceappeared to have almost an aversion to mathematical thought.He had a most unusual intuitive approach to involved physicalproblems, and when explaining new ideas to him, one quicklylearned not to befog the issue by writing down the differentialequation that might appear to clarify the situation. Lawrencewould say something to the effect that he didn't want to bebothered by the mathematical details, but "explain the physicsof the problem to me." One could live close to him for years,and think of him as being almost mathematically illiterate, butthen be brought up sharply to see how completely he retainedhis skill in the mathematics of classical electricity and magne-tism. This was one of the few heritages he brought from hisapprenticeship with W. F. G. Swann and the Physics Depart-ments of the 1920s. Almost everything that Lawrence did—andmore particularly, the way he did it—came from himself, notfrom his teachers.

In 1928 Lawrence left Yale for Berkeley, where, two yearslater at the age of twenty-nine, he became the youngest full pro-fessor on the Berkeley faculty. It is difficult for one startingon a scientific career today to appreciate the courage it took forhim to leave the security of a rich and distinguished universityand move into what was, by contrast, a small and only recentlyawakened physics department. In later life, when he needed toreassure himself that his judgment was good even though hedisagreed with the opinions of most of his friends, he would re-


call the universally dire predictions of his eastern friends; theyagreed that his future was bright if he stayed at Yale, but thathe would quickly go to seed in the "unscientific climate of theWest."

The predictions of a bright future for Ernest Lawrencewere solidly based. His doctor's thesis was in photoelectricity.Later, he made the most precise determination, to that time, ofthe ionization potential of the mercury atom. In his charac-teristically candid manner, he often depreciated this highlyregarded measurement. He had a preconceived "correct value"of the ionization potential in mind, and he would say in a con-trite manner that he looked for possible errors of the correctsign and magnitude to make his preconception come true.Every scientist has fought this battle with himself, but few haveused themselves as an example to impress their students withthe necessity of absolute honesty in scientific inquiry. Law-rence's value for the ionization potential has stood the test oftime, but he always shrugged it off by saying he was lucky; if hehad looked hard for errors of the opposite sign, he would havefound them, too. After this early experience with looseness inscience, Lawrence formed the habit of critically examining anyscientific result, regardless of its origin. He applied the samerigid standards of criticism to his own work, to that of his as-sociates, and to the reports from other laboratories. Visitorssometimes formed an early impression that Lawrence wasoverly critical of the experimental results of others, but theysoon found he encouraged his juniors to criticize his own workwith equal vigor. He believed that a scientific community thatdid not encourage its members to criticize each other's findingsin an open manner would quickly degenerate into an associa-tion of dilettantes. Scientific criticism was with him an im-personal reaction; he gave it or received it without any feel-ings of hostility. He did, however, reserve a bit of scorn for some


members of the profession who, in his opinion, drew unwar-ranted conclusions from each "bump and wiggle" of a curveobtained with poor counting statistics.

Lawrence's name is so closely associated with the field ofnuclear physics in the minds of most physicists today that itoften comes as a surprise to them to find that he had a dis-tinguished career in other branches of physics before he in-vented the cyclotron. After he moved to California, he con-tinued his work in photoelectricity, and together with hisstudents published a number of papers in this field. It is dif-ficult for one not intimately familiar with a particular area ofphysics to appraise the value of another's work in that area.But one can gain some idea of the esteem in which the workwas held by examining the literature of the period, and seeinghow often the work was referred to by the experimenter's peers.Fortunately for this purpose, an authoritative treatise on pho-toelectricity was published shortly after Lawrence left the fieldto concentrate his efforts on the cyclotron. Hughes and Du-Bridge's Photoelectric Phenomena appeared in 1932, and itcontains a biographical index of about 700 names. A quickexamination of the "multi-lined entries" shows that only twelveof the 700 experimenters were referred to more often thanErnest Lawrence. His contributions were referred to in alleight of the chapters that dealt with non-solid-state photo-electricity, which is a measure of Lawrence's breadth of cover-age of the field in the few years he devoted to it.

One of the references in Hughes and DuBridge's book is toLawrence's investigation of possible time lags in the photoelec-tric effect. He published several papers in the field of ultra-short-time-interval measurement while he was at Yale, and inthis work he was closely associated with Jesse Beams, who isnow Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia. Beamswas a pioneer in the use of the Kerr electrooptical effect as a


light shutter capable of opening in times of the order of KHsecond. He and his students investigated time lags in the Fara-day (magnetic rotation) effect, and he has devoted a majorportion of his distinguished scientific career to the study ofshort times, high accelerations, and other related phenomena.Lawrence and Beams showed that photoelectrons appearedwithin 2 X 10~9 second after light hit the photoelectric surface.Although these measurements were made more than thirty-fiveyears ago, they are modern in every other sense of the word.Only in the last few years has the measurement of time intervalsof 10~9 second come into routine use in the laboratory. Thisrenaissance is a direct result of the expenditure of vast sums ofmoney on the development of photomultiplier tubes, widebandamplifiers, high-speed oscilloscopes, and a host of auxiliaryequipment, such as coaxial cables and shielded connectors—none of which were available to Beams and Lawrence.

In this period, Lawrence and Beams performed their well-known experiment of "chopping up a photon." The uncer-tainty principle states that the energy of a system cannot bedetermined more accurately than about h/At, where h isPlanck's constant and At is the time available for the measure-ment. A narrow line in the optical spectrum is a system with avery small energy spread; each light quantum, or photon, hasthe same energy to within an uncertainty AE. Lawrence andBeams showed that, if they decreased the time available for theenergy measurement (by turning the light on and off again in asmall time At), the width of the spectral line increased as pre-dicted by the uncertainty principle. It is not generally knownthat Lawrence played an important part in the evolution of thehigh-speed rotating top which Beams later developed so beau-tifully. But the bibliographies of Beams and Lawrence showthat the first reference to the high-speed rotor is in an abstractby Lawrence, Beams, and Garman, dated 1928.


As a result of their scientific collaboration, Lawrence andBeams became very close personal friends. They took one sum-mer away from their work, and toured Europe together. Law-rence often referred nostalgically to that period in his life,when he could travel and see the sights without the responsi-bilities of the speeches and receptions which marked his latertours in foreign lands.

Shortly before Lawrence left Yale, he had an experiencethat is known to only a few of his close associates, but whichwas most important in his development as a scientist. At thattime, television was considered to be a rather impracticaldream, because the basic element was the rotating scanningwheel. It was obvious to everyone that this mechanical devicewould limit the development of picture quality by restrictingthe number of "picture lines" to less than 100. Lawrence's ex-perience with photoelectricity and the newly developing cath-ode-ray tube led him to believe that he could make an all-electronic television system without rotating wheels. He quicklyput together a rudimentary electronic television system, andbeing quite sure that he was not only the first to have the idea,but also the first to "reduce it to practice," he contacted afriend at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. After hearing Law-rence say that he had an important new idea in the field oftelevision, his friend invited him down to the Bell Labora-tories to talk about it. The friend took him through whatLawrence later described as a "whole floor" full of electronictelevision apparatus, with excellent pictures on cathode-raytubes that were beyond anything he had imagined might exist.After dreams of the financial reward his invention would bringhim, it was a real shock for him to see how far ahead a goodindustrial laboratory could be in a field that was important toit. He resolved then and there to concentrate on the things thathe knew most about, and not to dilute his effort by competing


in the commercial area. He kept firmly to this resolve until thelast decade of his life, when he had received all the honors thatwere available in the scientific world. He then turned some ofhis creative ability to the problem of color television, a fieldin which he contributed many new ideas. Paramount Picturessupported an extensive development of the "Lawrence tube,"or "Chromatron." In the last few years of his life, Lawrence wasissued dozens of patents on his inventions in the field of colortelevision.

Since it has only recently been considered "respectable" fora scientist to hold patents, it is worth reviewing Ernest Law-rence's attitude toward patents and the financial rewards frominventions. The cyclotron and the other Lawrence inventionsof the prewar era were patented in Lawrence's name, and as-signed by him to the Research Corporation. No royalties wereever asked by the Research Corporation, and Lawrence en-couraged and helped scientists throughout the world to buildcyclotrons. Lawrence was legally the inventor of the Calutronisotope separator, but he assigned the patent to the govern-ment for the nominal one dollar. Some of his colleagues in theatomic bomb project were awarded large sums of money by thegovernment for the infringement of their patents, but Lawrencenever allowed his name to be used in any litigation, and there-fore received no compensation for his wartime inventive ef-forts beyond his normal salary. Although he greatly enjoyedthe luxuries that came with wealth, and encouraged others tofollow his example of inventing for profit in peripheral areas,he felt that it was unwise to foster the patenting of scientificdiscoveries or developments for personal profit. One of hisgreatest accomplishments was the encouragement of scientificcolleagues to work closely together in an atmosphere of com-plete freedom for exchanging ideas. (As an extreme example ofthe pre-Lawrence method, one can recall that Roentgen spent


several weeks in a detailed study of the properties of X raysbefore he told the men in the adjacent research rooms of hisdiscovery.) Lawrence was acutely aware of the change he hadwrought in the methods of doing physics, and was worried thatpatent consciousness might turn back the pages of progress. Ashe expressed it, a man would be very careful how he talked overhis new ideas if the person to whom he was talking might en-large on them and subsequently make a fortune from a patent.

While at New Haven, Lawrence was a frequent visitor inthe home of Dr. George Blumer, Dean of the Yale MedicalSchool. It was soon obvious that he particularly enjoyed thecompany of the eldest of the four Blumer girls, sixteen-year-old Mary, or Molly as she is known to all her friends. Theywere engaged in 1931; he returned to New Haven the nextyear and brought her as his bride to live in Berkeley. Two yearslater Eric, the first of the six Lawrence children, was born; hewas followed by Margaret, Mary, Robert, Barbara, and Susan.With Ernest and the children, Molly Lawrence created a homethat was famous throughout the world of physics for its warmthand hospitality. In it, they entertained the steady parade ofvisitors to the Radiation Laboratory. In 1941, Molly's sisterElsie became the wife of Edwin McMillan, the present direc-tor of the Laboratory. Completing the family group in Berke-ley were Ernest's parents, who settled there when the elder Dr.Lawrence retired from his distinguished career in education,and Ernest's brother, John, whose pioneering role in the medi-cal aspects of radiation is mentioned later in this memoir.Surely one of Ernest Lawrence's greatest satisfactions must havecome from the knowledge that his mother's life had been savedby radiation therapy, using the one-million-volt "Sloan-Law-rence" X-ray machine at the University of California MedicalSchool. After Mrs. Lawrence had been told by many distin-guished specialists that she had an inoperable tumor, she was


treated, more or less in desperation, with the novel resonancetransformer device which Lawrence and his co-workers, in theincredibly busy days of the early 1930s, had installed in the SanFrancisco Hospital. At the time of her son's death, she wasstill living in Berkeley, twenty-one years after Dr. Robert Stonetreated her with the only million-volt X rays then available inthe world.

In the period when Ernest Lawrence was moving from NewHaven to Berkeley, physicists were excited by the news of thenuclear transformations being achieved in Lord Rutherford'sCavendish Laboratory, at Cambridge, England. It was generallyrecognized that an important segment of the future of physicslay in the study of nuclear reactions, but the tedious nature ofRutherford's technique (using the alpha particles from ra-dium) repelled most prospective nuclear physicists. Simplecalculations showed that one microampere of electrically ac-celerated light nuclei would be more valuable than the world'stotal supply of radium—if the nuclear particles had energies inthe neighborhood of a million electron volts. As a result of suchcalculations, several teams of physicists set about to producebeams of "million-volt particles." Cockcroft and Walton at theCavendish Laboratory used a cascade rectifier plus a simpleacceleration tube, and although they never reached their ini-tial goal of a million volts, they found that nuclear reactionstook place copiously at a few hundred kilo electron volts.

Lawrence had spent enough time in the study of spark dis-charges with the Kerr electrooptical shutter to develop a veryhealthy respect for the spark-breakdown mechanism as a volt-age limiter. He followed the early work of Van de Graaff,whose electrostatic generator made spectacular high-voltagesparks, and the work of Brasch and Lange, who attempted toharness lightning discharges to the acceleration of chargedparticles. Although he wanted to "get into the nuclear busi-


ness," the avenues then available didn't appeal to him, becausethey all involved high voltages and spark breakdown.

In his early bachelor days at Berkeley, Lawrence spent manyof his evenings in the library, reading widely, both profession-ally and for recreation. Although he had passed his French andGerman requirements for the doctor's degree by the slimmest ofmargins, and consequently had almost no facility with eitherlanguage, he faithfully leafed through the back issues of theforeign periodicals, night after night. On one memorable oc-casion, while browsing through a journal seldom consulted byphysicists, Arkiv fur Electroteknik, he came across an article byR. Wideroe entitled "t)ber ein neues Prinzip zur Herstellunghoher Spannungen." Lawrence was excited by the easily under-stood title, and immediately looked at the illustrations. Oneshowed the arrangement Wideroe had employed to acceleratepotassium ions to 50,000 electron volts, using a double accelera-tion from ground to ground, through a "drift tube" attached toa radio-frequency source of 25,000 volts. Lawrence immediatelysensed the importance of the idea, and decided to try the obvi-ous extension of the idea to many accelerations through drifttubes attached alternately to two radio-frequency "bus bars."Since he could do his own thinking faster than he could trans-late Wideroe's classic paper, Lawrence had the pleasure of in-dependently arriving at many of Wideroe's conclusions. Itstruck him almost immediately that one might "wind up" alinear accelerator into a spiral accelerator by putting it in amagnetic field. He was prepared to arrange the magnetic fieldto vary in some manner with the radius, in order that the timeof revolution of an ion would remain constant as its orbit in-creased in radius. A simple calculation, on the spot, showedthat no radial variation of the magnetic field was needed—ionsin a constant magnetic field circulate with constant frequency,regardless of their energy.


One of my most cherished memories is of a Sunday after-noon* in the Lawrence living room, about fifteen years ago.Young Eric came in to tell his father that his high school phys-ics teacher had assigned him the responsibility of explainingthe cyclotron to his class. His father produced a pad of paperand a pencil, and while I pretended to read a magazine, butlistened with one ear, he explained the cyclotron to his eldestson. He told how when the particles were going slowly, theywent around in little circles, and when they were going faster,the magnet couldn't bend them so easily, so they went in biggercircles, and had farther to go. The interesting thing was that theslow ions in the little circles took the same time to go aroundas the fast ions in the big circles, so one could push and pull onall of them at the same rate, and speed them all up. Eric thoughtabout this for a short while, looked at his father with admira-tion, and said, "Gee, Daddy, that's neatl" I've always thoughtthat the Nobel Committee must have had something of thatfeeling when they voted the Nobel Prize to Ernest Lawrencein 1939.

According to Lawrence, an ion with a charge-to-mass ratioof e/m will circulate in a magnetic field H, at an angularvelocity <o, given by the equation

o) = 2xf = (H/c) (e/m);

here f is the rotational frequency of the ion, in cycles per sec-ond, and c is the velocity of light. If an ion is to be acceleratedas it circulates in a magnetic field, one must impose on it analternating electric field of the same frequency. If there wasany element of "luck" in Lawrence's career, it was the readyavailability in the 1930s of electronic components appropriateto the frequency range of about 10 megacycles. This is thefrequency one obtains by substituting into the cyclotron equa-tion the e/m value for the hydrogen molecular ion (or the


soon-to-be-discovered deuteron) together with the magneticfield strength that is most easily obtained with an iron-coredelectromagnet. Had the calculated frequency turned out to be4000 times as great (as it is for the electron), cyclotrons wouldprobably not have appeared on the scene until World War IIhad fathered the necessary microwave oscillators. I originallywrote the last sentence without the qualifying word "prob-ably," but inserted it after recalling the many other technicalinnovations created by Lawrence in his drive to make the cy-clotron a reality. He and his co-workers, M. Stanley Livingstonand David Sloan, found it necessary to develop and build theirown vacuum pumps and high-power oscillator tubes, becausenone with the required capacity were commercially availableat a price they could pay. They were soon using the largesthigh-vacuum pumps in the world, the highest-power radio oscil-lators ever seen, and the largest magnet then in operation. Hadthey needed high-power microwave oscillators, they wouldprobably have invented and built them, just as Hansen andhis co-workers did a decade later at Stanford.

Lawrence is best known for his application of the cyclotronequation to nuclear physics, but he also used the equation tohelp devise the most accurate method of measuring the specificcharge, e/m, of the electron. The method was employed byFrank Dunnington, one of Lawrence's students, in what re-mained for many years the most precise measurement of thisimportant fundamental constant.

The first demonstration of the cyclotron resonance princi-ple was reported at the Berkeley meeting of the National Acad-emy of Sciences, in the fall of 1930, by E. O. Lawrence andN. E. Edlefson. Their original apparatus is on permanent ex-hibit at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, together with thebrass vacuum chamber of the first 4-inch-diameter cyclotronof Lawrence and Livingston, which accelerated hydrogen mo-


lecular ions to an energy of 80,000 electron volts. Lawrence andLivingston went on at once to build an 11-inch cyclotron, whichthey hoped would be the first accelerator to yield "artificialdisintegration" of light nuclei. The device was giving protonswith an energy of several hundred keV (which we now knowwould have been quite adequate for the job) in the spring of1932, but Lawrence and Livingston pressed on to their goalof 1 million electron volts, which appeared to be well withinreach. They had no counting equipment in their laboratory,but two friends from Yale, Donald Cooksey and Franz Kurie,were to bring counters to Berkeley in the summer of 1932, tohelp with the observations. When the visitors arrived, theymade it possible for the Berkeley team to repeat the now famouswork of Cockcroft and Walton, who had announced their dis-covery of the disintegration of lithium by protons in early 1932.This was the first of several important discoveries in nuclearphysics that could almost as well have been made in Lawrence'slaboratory. But, of course, many laboratories in the world, in-cluding all the accelerator laboratories, missed the same laterdiscoveries. The first "miss" at Berkeley—the disintegration oflithium—involved the identical mistake Cockcroft and Waltonhad also made earlier; neither group had looked at the lowerenergies we now know were sufficient to have done the job. Thesuccessful Berkeley experiment was planned for the summer of1932 when counting equipment would be available, and it wascarried off on schedule. Cockcroft and Walton simply got theirexperiment done first.

But for those who became physicists after World War IIand who may be unacquainted with the primitive world of theearly accelerator laboratory, a few words will provide an un-derstanding of how Lawrence and his co-workers missed arti-ficial radioactivity, and after that, the discovery that neutronscan produce artificial radioactivity. We should keep in mind


that the development of the cyclotron, which actually had beenridiculed by some physicists as impractical, was an extremelydifficult technological task that only a man of Lawrence's dar-ing would have undertaken. To make it work required thedevelopment of technologies and arts that were not thenknown. What seems to easy today was won only with sweat andlong hours by Lawrence and his associates in the early thirties.In the beginning most of the time of the Berkeley group wasconcentrated on developing the cyclotron into the efficient toolthat was subsequently used with such proficiency in many re-search areas.

The 27-inch cyclotron was built with incredible speed in anold wooden building near Le Conte Hall, the home of thePhysics Department, and the birthplace of the smaller cyclo-trons. The old wooden Radiation Laboratory, which was finallytorn down in 1959, was the first of the modern nuclear physicslaboratories—institutes in which experimentalists collaboratedon joint projects, or worked on their own research projects, asthey saw fit. The great enthusiasm for physics with which ErnestLawrence charged the atmosphere of the Laboratory will alwayslive in the memory of those who experienced it. The Labora-tory operated around the clock, seven days a week, and thosewho worked a mere seventy hours a week were considered bytheir friends to be "not very interested in physics." The onlytime the Laboratory was really deserted was for two hoursevery Monday night, when Lawrence's beloved "Journal Club"was meeting. He initiated this weekly meeting when the cyclo-tron looked as though it might become useful in nuclear phys-ics; he and his associates reported to each other the latest pub-lications in nuclear physics, so they would know what to dowhen their new tools were ready. But soon the Journal Clubbecame a forum in which the rapidly growing Laboratory staffdiscussed their own discoveries in radioactivity and allied fields.


The 27-inch cyclotron—later converted to a 37-inch polediameter—was originally used in studies of artificial transmu-tations induced by high-energy protons. Immediately after thediscovery of deuterium by Urey in 1932, Professor G. N. Lewisof the Chemistry Department supplied the Laboratory with afew drops of heavy water, and Lawrence, Lewis, and Living-ston observed the first reactions induced by deuterons. The de-tecting device used in all these early experiments was a "thinionization chamber" plus a linear amplifier. Such a chamberresponds to fast atomic ions (protons and a particles) but not tothe ft rays from radioactive substances; to detect /? rays, oneneeds a more sensitive device, for example, a Geiger counter.Lawrence and his collaborators made several attempts to man-ufacture Geiger counters in the Radiation Laboratory, but alltheir counters suffered from excessively high "backgroundrates." Today, when Geiger counters are commercially availablefrom dozens of companies, it is difficult to believe that Law-rence and his associates could have overlooked the fact that thehigh backgrounds were the result of a general high level ofradioactivity in the whole laboratory—artificial radioactivity,to be more exact! But in those days, the rare experimentalistswho could make good Geiger counters were looked upon aspractitioners of witchcraft; their less fortunate friends mighttry for months without hitting the magic formula. So afterseveral abortive attempts to make useful counters, the Berke-ley group went back to the linear amplifier technique thatothers considered even more difficult, but which was nonethe-less one that they had mastered. It was not until the announce-ment in 1934 of the discovery of artificial radioactivity byCurie and Joliot that Ernest Lawrence and his associates re-alized why they couldn't make a decent Geiger counter; theirwhole laboratory was radioactive!

The discovery of artificial radioactivity had been missed by


all the accelerator teams then operating throughout the world,so the next few months saw the discovery of dozens of radioac-tive species by members of the accelerator fraternity. The factthat none of the "machine builders" had noticed the phe-nomenon of artificial radioactivity puts the oversight by thecyclotron group in proper perspective. Their oversight wassymptomatic of the general unrealiability of all detection de-vices in those days, coupled with the great complexity of the ac-celerators themselves, rather than a deficiency in the men asscientists.

It is interesting to note that Irene Curie and FredericJoliot had the largest source of "trouble-free" polonium in theworld. For a quarter of a century, doctors all over the worldhad taken pleasure in sending their old "radon needles" toMadame Curie, as a token of respect. From many thousands ofthese otherwise useless glass tubes, she had isolated more thana curie of polonium—by far the strongest sample of the ele-ment in the world. Her daughter and son-in-law put this pre-cious sample to good use in their nuclear investigations in theearly 1930s. They used their polonium to generate neutrons,but they didn't realize what they had done. Chadwick readtheir report and immediately recognized its significance; a fewdays later he had proved that the neutron existed. (So Law-rence was in good company when he let two big discoveries gounnoticed in his Laboratory.)

The Joliot-Curies used their unique source two years laterin the discovery of artificial radioactivity. The fact that polo-nium does not emit /? or 7 rays made it possible for them to ob-serve the "induced activity" during the time the a particleswere bombarding their aluminum target. Accelerator physicistswere denied this simple technique, because of the backgroundradiation from their machines. But even with this advantage,the Joilot-Curies almost missed their great discovery; they al-


most dismissed the change in counting rate of their first arti-ficially radioactive source as being due to the erratic behaviorof their Geiger counter! It was only after the builder of thecounter had insisted for several days that his handiwork wasreliable that the Joliot-Curies became convinced that the phe-nomenon of artificial radioactivity really did exist.

That Lawrence's group, and all the other accelerator teams,did not anticipate the work of Fermi and his collaborators inthe field of neutron-induced radioactivity is a different story,but again one which has an easy explanation in terms of itssetting in time. Calculations of "yields" of nuclear reactionswere made every day, and it was painfully obvious that onehad to bombard a target with more than a million fast particlesin order to observe one nuclear reaction. Everyone had thoughtof the possibility of using the high-energy « particles from theartificial disintegration of lithium as substitutes for the slowera particles from the decay of polonium. But "that factor of amillion" always stood in the way, and it finally led to a firmlyheld conviction that "secondary reactions can't be observed."Certainly, Lawrence and others considered the use of neutronsto produce artificial radioactivity, but the factor of a millionalways made them turn their minds to other things. But Fermi,who was far removed from the pressures of an accelerator lab-oratory, looked at the problem from first principles, and re-alized immediately that every neutron would make a nuclearreaction. In other words, secondary reactions would be as prev-alent as primary ones, if neutrons were involved. The story ofhis success is well known and need not be repeated here. Law-rence often spoke of the day he first heard of Fermi's classicexperiments, and how he verified Fermi's discovery of the neu-tron-induced radioactivity of silver within a minute or two.He merely took a fifty-cent piece from his pocket, placed it nearthe cyclotron, and then watched it instantaneously discharge


an electroscope after the cyclotron had been turned off.One normally does not dwell so long in a scientific obituary

on those occasions when the subject failed to find what he wasapparently equipped to find. But Ernest Lawrence would notwant such interesting bits of history to be swept under a rug.He was so accustomed to his own success and to that of hislaboratory colleagues that he enjoyed recounting his mistakes,without ever mentioning the mitigating factors just related.From 1931 until 1950, Lawrence's laboratory was the home ofthe highest-energy beams of particles in the world, and for sev-eral years in the mid-fifties the Bevatron was the highest-energymachine in operation. Such figures by themselves mean noth-ing, but they do indicate that in that period the Radiation Lab-oratory could do important experiments that were difficult, ifnot impossible, at other institutions. Ernest Lawrence was al-ways conscious of the importance of beam intensity in additionto beam energy, and worked diligently to see that all his acceler-ators kept producing larger currents of accelerated ions. Heoften spoke with satisfaction of the proven value of his longcampaign to increase beam current (often in the face of op-position from his younger colleagues, who wanted to "use whatwe have" rather than shut down for improvements).

By 1937 Lawrence had succeeded in pushing the cyclotroncurrent up to 100 microamperes, at 8 million electron volts.Other accelerator builders of this period were content with 1microampere at 1 million electron volts. Lawrence's young as-sociates felt sure that the cyclotron had reached its peak in the"beam intensity department," but Lawrence soon found thatthe cyclotron was doing ten times as well as anyone had sus-pected. Lawrence was always the best cyclotron operator in thisperiod; he could "get more beam" than anyone else. One day,he noticed that, as the magnetic field passed through the res-onance value, the meters in the oscillator power supply showed


a "loading" ten times as great as the 800 watts one would pre-dict (100 microamperes times 8 million volts = 800 watts).Lawrence knew at once that this power must be going into anaccelerated beam that wasn't reaching the detector. It was soonafter this that Lawrence encouraged Martin Kamen to installtwo water-cooled probes to intersect the circulating beam thathad formerly been lost. So now, in addition to the 100 micro-amperes of "external beam," another milliampere was alwaysat work producing radioactive isotopes for Dr. John Lawrence'smedical program.

One of the important reasons for Lawrence's concern withhigh intensity was his great interest in the medical and bi-ological applications of the radiations from the cyclotron andfrom the radioactive substances it produced. A physicist canordinarily compensate for a lower intensity by building moresensitive detectors. But in medicine, one must accept the hu-man body as it is; if the radiation levels are too low, the bodyuses its healing mechanisms to minimize the effects that areunder investigation.

Lawrence persuaded his brother John to come to Berkeleyat first as a visitor to advise him on the potential hazards of theneutrons from the 27-inch cyclotron. Later, John Lawrenceheaded a strong research team that investigated many phasesof the new radiation medicine and biology. Ernest Lawrence,who had abandoned a medical career for one in physics, nowhad the vicarious pleasure of a "second life" in medical phys-ics. He gave the Laboratory medical program his strongest sup-port, often in the face of keen disappointment on the part ofsome of the physicists who worked so hard to keep the cyclotronin operating condition and whose research efforts had to becurtailed. In 1938 and 1939, all physics at the cyclotron wassuspended for a full day each week, so that terminal cancer pa-tients could be treated with neutrons from the 37-inch cyclo-


tron. The oil-stained cyclotron was cleverly disguised with a setof white panels, and the patients were led through a side doorinto what appeared to be an immaculate hospital room.

Lawrence was actively engaged in promoting the use ofradioactive isotopes throughout the biological and chemicalfields, both as tracers and as sources of radiation. He committedhis Laboratory to furnishing the materials for experimentalprograms in many University of California departments, andhe derived great satisfaction from the important discoveriesmade by his colleagues in other scientific disciplines. The col-laboration between physicists and biologists naturally blos-somed after the development of the nuclear reactor, whenradioactive isotopes became widely available. But the real pi-oneer in this area was Ernest Lawrence, who shared the hard-earned fruits of his labor with his University colleagues becausehe thought it was in the best interest of science.

Everyone recognized that Lawrence was responsible for thesteady increase in the peak energy of the accelerated beamsavailable in the Radiation Laboratory, and throughout theworld. But Lawrence himself seemed to derive even moresatisfaction from his steady drive toward higher beam inten-sities. He could point to the discovery of carbon-14, by Rubinand Kamen, as an immediate dividend of his obsession withhigher intensities. 14C could not have been discovered at anyother laboratory in the world with the detection techniquesthen available. And although Lawrence never said so to any-one but his closest associates, he was convinced that his greatconcern for beam intensity was what had really made the wholeManhattan District program possible.

Physicists on both sides of the Atlantic had spent a greatdeal of effort in theoretical and experimental design studies fornuclear chain reactors, but these devices apparently had norelevance to the "war effort." It was not until the discovery of


plutonium and its fissionable properties by Lawrence's co-workers at the Radiation Laboratory that the reactor programhad a clearly denned role in the military program. And as wastrue in the case of 14C, plutonium could not have been foundanywhere but at Berkeley; its discovery required the enormousparticle fluxes that came from Lawrence's long campaign to in-crease both the energy and the intensity of his ion beams.

As is well known, the Manhattan District's program wasthree-pronged; uranium-235 for bombs was made by two iso-tope separation processes and plutonium-239 was created inthe chain reactors. Lawrence spent several of the war years per-fecting the Calutron, or mass-spectrometer method of separat-ing 235U from ordinary uranium. It is probably true that noone but Ernest Lawrence could have made a success of the Cal-utron process; the ion currents required were millions oftimes as great as anyone had even dreamed of before. So Law-rence's concern with beam intensity was the key element in twoof the three successful attempts to produce fissionable materialin the war period.

In believing that his own pioneering work in two of thethree major processes was the key to the acceptance of theAtomic Bomb Project by the government, Lawrence in no waydepreciated the accomplishments of the reactor designers or ofthe gaseous diffusion experts. He simply felt, from a great dealof experience with high-level government officials, that theproject could not have "been sold" unless there was one "sureway" to make fissionable material before the war was over.(The threat of postwar Congressional investigations into thewaste of money on "boondoggles" hung over the scientificpolicy makers in those days.) The Calutron process was com-plicated and expensive relative to the gaseous diffusion process,but once a single unit had worked, there was no doubt that theapplication of large amounts of money could produce enough


material for a bomb. Lawrence, who was personally involvedin many of the key sessions that culminated in the establish-ment of the Manhattan District, always felt that this argumentconvinced the decision makers in Washington to authorize allthree approaches to the production problem.

To return to the cyclotron development, we can note twomilestones: the initial operation of the 60-inch cyclotron in1939, and the authorization of the 184-inch cyclotron in 1940.The 60-inch cyclotron was installed in the new Crocker Radi-ation Laboratory; its historic contribution to the discovery ofplutonium has already been mentioned. The RockefellerFoundation gave the University of California 1.25 million dol-lars in 1940 to build the 184-inch cyclotron on the hill behindthe Berkeley campus.

Before work could be started on the "giant cyclotron," asLawrence referred to it in those days, international events con-spired to change the character of the Laboratory. In the sum-mer of 1940, Lawrence returned to Berkeley from a New Yorkvisit with his longtime friend, Dr. Alfred Loomis. Loomis hadplayed a key role in the discussions with the RockefellerFoundation officials, and Lawrence had great respect for hiscounsel. Loomis had been active in the establishment of theNational Defense Research Committee, which was headed byVannevar Bush, Karl Compton, and James Conant. Loomisintroduced Lawrence to the members of the British ScientificMission, who were visiting the country at the time. From hisold friend, Sir John Cockcroft, Lawrence learned for the firsttime of the outstanding scientific contributions to the Britishwar effort, many of them made by nuclear physicists. Beforereturning to Berkeley, he joined the NDRC Microwave Com-mittee, under the chairmanship of Alfred Loomis. He assumedthe responsibility for recruiting a group of young experimentalnuclear physicists to help the British "fight the scientific war."


He persuaded Lee DuBridge to leave his own cyclotron atRochester, New York, and head the embryonic RadiationLaboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Thename of the laboratory, together with its staff of nuclear phys-icists, was intended as a "cover" to mislead the curious into be-lieving that its mission was in the field of nuclear fission. Inthose days, fission was not treated seriously as a war project, butthe mere idea that planes could be detected by radio echoeswas considered to be exceedingly secret information.) Lawrencerecruited a fine staff of young physicists, many of them hisformer students. Most of them gave up their exciting careersin nuclear physics, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, forthe simple reason that Ernest Lawrence came to see them andtold them it was the most important thing they could do. Fromhis own Laboratory he recruited McMillan, Salisbury, and Al-varez. The M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory came into being inNovember of 1940, and its contributions to radar are too wellknown to be recounted here. Lawrence visited the laboratoryfrequently in its first year and kept abreast of its activities inthat period. But it was soon obvious that the laboratory couldstand on its own feet, and Lawrence had other demands on histalents.

In the summer of 1941 Lawrence became involved in theantisubmarine warfare program; German submarines were thenclose to destroying the convoy system that was supplying GreatBritain from the United States. Lawrence again acted as thechief recruiting agent for the new underwater sound labora-tories, and persuaded McMillan to leave M.I.T. for San Diego.Shortly thereafter, he converted the 37-inch cyclotron into amass spectrometer for separating small amounts of 235U fromordinary uranium. This work convinced him that the electro-magnetic separation technique could be expanded to becomea large-scale process for producing 2S5U. In his characteristicmanner, he immediately committed his Laboratory and his


reputation to the project. Although he had recently staffed twolaboratories with many of his best students, he still could callon a number of his top-flight proteges to restaff the BerkeleyRadiation Laboratory.

From the summer of 1941 until the summer of 1945, theRadiation Laboratory worked around the clock on the techni-cal problems involved in the electromagnetic separation of235U. The 184-inch cyclotron magnet, assembled in a new lab-oratory high above the Berkeley campus, served as a workingmodel for the hundreds of mass spectrometers soon to be con-structed in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence himself, and allhis associates, worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Itwas a Herculean effort, and it was almost solely responsible forthe 23BU that made up the Hiroshima bomb. The thermal dif-fusion process and the gaseous diffusion process contributedonly in a minor way to the over-all separation of the isotopesfor the first bomb; Lawrence's fantastic mass spectrometer plantat Oak Ridge bore the brunt of the effort. (Shortly after thewar, Lawrence's plant was shut down, and the more efficientgaseous diffusion plant took over the peacetime production of235U.)

One of the greatest difficulties one encounters in writing ofErnest Lawrence's career is that so much must be omitted inorder to keep the account within reasonable bounds. It is alsoa pity that Lawrence himself wrote nothing of the experienceshe had in his five intensely busy war years, nor of the technicalproblems he met and solved in that period. Because of this,there exists an apparently comprehensive book on the electro-magnetic separation of isotopes with but a single mention of hisname. However, in the minds of those who worked with himduring the war there is no question that his foresight, daring,leadership and technical ingenuity were the key ingredients inthe success of the venture.

In early 1945, when the completed Oak Ridge plant was in


full production, Lawrence turned his thoughts toward the post-war period. He persuaded General Groves (for whom he hada great respect that was apparently reciprocated) to authorizethe conversion of the Laboratory to its peacetime mission. Man-hattan District funds were accordingly made available to com-plete the 184-inch cyclotron, and to build a proton linear ac-celerator and an electron synchrotron. The synchrotron hadjust been invented by McMillan, and Alvarez's radar experi-ence had convinced him that a proton linear accelerator couldbe built.

In the fall of 1945 the prewar Berkeley team was reas-sembled, together with some talented newcomers whose abil-ities had first come to light in the wartime effort. One of thefirst major decisions Lawrence had to make concerned the184-inch cyclotron. It had been planned as a "conventionalcyclotron," but its performance under those circumstanceswould have been marginal at best. McMillan's theory of phasestability indicated that the 184-inch machine would performmore satisfactorily as a synchrocyclotron; its proton energyshould rise to 350 MeV, from the earlier design figure of per-haps 70 MeV. But, on the other hand, no one had ever builta synchrocyclotron, and the problems foreseen were formidable.Lawrence and McMillan called for the immediate rebuildingof the old 37-inch cyclotron. It was soon operating as the world'sfirst synchrocyclotron, and it showed that the new device wasmuch simpler to build and operate than the originally proposedconventional cyclotron. As a result of these early model tests,the 184-inch synchrocyclotron was accelerating deuterons to180 MeV, and helium nuclei to 360 MeV, in late 1946.

Since this is the story of Ernest Lawrence's career, very littlewill be said about the new laboratory activites that were pri-marily the responsibilities of his younger colleagues. In addi-tion to the two accelerators built under the supervision of


McMillan and Alvarez, there were two important new chemicalprojects under Seaborg and Calvin. Seaborg returned to Berk-eley from his successful wartime duties as director of the chem-ical phases of the Plutonium Project in Chicago. Calvin hadplayed several important roles in the OSRD Chemistry Section,and was anxious to study photosynthesis with 14C, which wassoon to be in plentiful supply as a direct result of the hugeneutron fluxes now available from nuclear reactors. In effect,all of us had "gone away as boys, and come back as men." Wehad all initiated large technical projects, and carried them tocompletion as directors of large teams of scientists and tech-nicians. We were all prepared to reassume our subordinateroles, with Ernest Lawrence as our "leader" once again. But hemade it clear by his actions, if not by his words, that we wereto be free agents. We made all our own technical and personneldecisions, and for the first few years after the war, at least,we had unlimited financial backing. It was not until the"blank check" from the Manhattan District was replaced bymore normal budgeting procedures that we felt any limita-tions on our ability to do whatever we thought should be donein our own areas of responsibility. Ernest Lawrence showed akeen interest in what we were doing, but in these early postwaryears he never gave a sign that he thought his function was togive us advice of any kind. Wise parents let their children solveall the problems they can, but they stand by to help when theproblems are too difficult. Ernest Lawrence was always a wise"scientific parent"; all of us who were fortunate enough to behis "scientific children" will remember with gratitude the helpand understanding he gave us when we needed it, as well asthe freedom he gave us to solve our own problems when itseemed that we could eventually succeed.

With the completion of the 184-inch cyclotron, Lawrenceonce again became an active research worker. He had not been


directly involved in any particular experiment since his 1935work on deuteron-induced radioactivities. As soon as the 184-inch cyclotron was operating, Lawrence became an active par-ticipant in experiments using the recently discovered high-en-ergy neutrons produced by "deuteron stripping." He personallydiscovered the delayed neutron activity that he and his col-leagues soon showed was due to nitrogen-17. It was a refreshingexperience for many of his young colleagues, who had knownhim largely as a laboratory director and as a person with greatskill in diagnosing troubles in complicated scientific tools, tosee the complete devotion he now showed to personal involve-ment in basic scientific research. Soon after the 17N mystery wasunraveled, Lawrence became convinced that the 184-inch cy-clotron could produce the newly discovered •* mesons. EdwardTeller had pointed out that, even though the cyclotron's en-ergy seemed too low to produce pions, there was some hopethat with the aid of the Fermi momentum of an incident a par-ticle, and of a carbon target nucleus, the job could be done.Lawrence worked closely with Eugene Gardner in this period,designing experimental setups using nuclear emulsions as de-tectors, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

Shortly after these early experiments, C. M. J. Lattes arrivedin Berkeley. He had been a member of the Bristol team that,under the leadership of C. F. Powell, had recently discoveredthe IT meson. He quickly showed that the difficulties encoun-tered by Gardner and Lawrence had been due to improperprocessing of the nuclear emulsions. Lattes immediately cor-rected the Berkeley development techniques, and a new set ofexposures was made soon after his arrival, using the apparatusdesigned by Lawrence and Gardner. Lattes also brought a fa-miliarity with the tracks of •* mesons in emulsion that was avail-able to only a few physicists in the world at that time, and heapplied his keen eyesight to the tedious scanning of the ex-


posed plates. His diligence was rewarded with success, one eve-ning, when he observed tracks of the first artificially producednegative pion coming to rest in an exposed nuclear emulsionplate. He and Gardner immediately called Lawrence, who wasentertaining visitors at an Oakland restaurant. Lawrence left thedinner, and as soon as he looked through the microscope, heexperienced one of the greatest thrills of his life. Although hehad played a major role in the discovery by his activities bothin procuring the money for and designing the 184-inch cyclo-tron and, more particularly, in designing the apparatus usedin the experiment, he characteristically insisted that the his-torical paper should be signed "Gardner and Lattes."

For a period of several years after the war, Lawrence de-voted all his waking hours to the pursuit of basic science at theRadiation Laboratory. Lawrence was fortunate in having anadministrative staff that had learned to cope with the problemsof a much larger wartime organization, so he was relativelyfree to concentrate on the scientific activities of the many sec-tions of his Laboratory. He took a great personal interest in theprograms on photosynthesis, medical physics, and nuclear chem-istry, but the intensity of his involvement in the physics programwas a source of amazement to his younger colleagues. It was arare week that he did not spend several hours each evening andmuch of Saturday and Sunday in the cyclotron building, orwandering through other laboratories, talking to everyone fromresearch assistants to visiting professors. Even though the Lab-oratory was now almost a hundred times as large in manpoweras it had been fifteen years earlier, everyone still had the feelingthat he was a "member of Ernest Lawrence's team"—not simplyan employee of the Radiation Laboratory. Even at present, al-most twenty years after this exciting phase of the Laboratory'shistory, technicians as well as senior staff members continue toswap their favorite stories of "the time Professor Lawrence


looked over my shoulder at 3:00 A.M. and asked what I wasdoing."

In 1948 William Brobeck convinced the Laboratory staffthat a proton synchrotron could be built in the multibillion-electron-volt range. Lawrence immediately assumed the respon-sibility of securing financial backing for the "Bevatron" fromthe Atomic Energy Commission and Congress. The BrookhavenNational Laboratory had recently been established, and it wassimultaneously asking for support for a similar accelerator. TheAEC eventually authorized the 6.2-BeV Bevatron at Berkeleyand the 3-BeV Cosmotron on Long Island. The Cosmotroncame into operation before the Bevatron, for two reasons. Law-rence, with a conservatism that many of his associates had notobserved before, decided to build a quarter-scale model of theBevatron, to be sure that the untried principle of "externalinjection" into a synchrotron would work. The model, as de-signed by Brobeck, worked within nine months of the decisionto build it, and the "go-ahead signal" for the Bevatron was im-mediately given by Lawrence. But soon after this decision hadbeen made, the USSR exploded its first nuclear device, andLawrence turned his attention once again to problems of na-tional security.

Lawrence played a key role in the U.S. decision to embarkon a program leading to the development of a thermonuclearbomb. Soon after President Truman made the decision to buildthe hydrogen bomb, Lawrence became concerned with the se-rious shortage of uranium reserves available to the UnitedStates. He felt that the country might soon be plagued with aneutron shortage, occasioned by the dwindling supply of 235U.His solution to the problem was the construction of a high-energy, high-current deuteron linear accelerator that wouldproduce neutrons by impact on heavy targets. Experiments atthe 184-inch cyclotron had shown surprisingly high "neutron


multiplicities" in such collisions. A 60-foot-diameter 60-foot-long test section of the accelerator was built at the Labora-tory's newly acquired Livermore site, and it accelerated un-precedented currents of close to one ampere to several millionelectron volts. The project was abandoned when another so-lution to the neutron shortage problem proved successful; theAEC offered substantial cash payments for uranium finds in thecontinental United States. A flood of prospectors with Geigercounters promptly showed that there were enormous and pre-viously unknown reserves of uranium in the Rocky Mountainstates. (At the present date, the Canadian government is con-sidering a program patterned after Lawrence's scheme of elec-tronuclear neutron production, as an effective competitor tonuclear reactors. An advantage of the accelerator method isthe lower power density in the neutron-producing target, perunit of neutron flux, than in nuclear reactors.)

In 1952 Lawrence expressed concern that all the U.S. nu-clear weapons design effort was concentrated in a single gov-ernment laboratory. He had great respect for the members ofthe Los Alamos Laboratory, and for their extraordinary ac-complishments. Nonetheless, his extensive experience as a sci-entific consultant to many of the largest U.S. technical corpora-tions gave him firsthand experience with the benefits of ahealthy competition between independent development labora-tories. He therefore urged the AEC and the Joint Congres-sional Committee on Atomic Energy to set up a second weap-ons laboratory. He offered the Livermore site as a suitablelocation, and pledged his personal oversight of the new project.The Laboratory was established in 1952, with Herbert York asdirector and Edward Teller as a senior member of the staff.Most of the key group leaders were young physicists, chemists,and engineers trained in the Berkeley Laboratory. Lawrencespent most of his remaining time and effort on the affairs of


the Livermore Laboratory until his death in 1958. The youngcompetitor in the field of nuclear weapons "stubbed its toe"several times in the early years, but later it made the substantialcontributions to the design of nuclear weapons that Lawrencehad forseen as its destiny. Without the steadying hand ofErnest Lawrence in the difficult early years, the LivermoreLaboratory might easily have failed in its purpose, and thecountry as a whole would have been the loser. Lawrence's lastproteges, the first three directors of the Livermore Laboratory,are a remarkable group of young men. Each of them, in turn,went from Livermore to a position of great responsibility inthe Pentagon—the Director of Defense Research and Engi-neering. Herbert York left Washington to become Chancellorof the San Diego campus of the University of California, Har-old Brown became Secretary of the Air Force at the age ofthirty-eight, and John Foster is still "DDR and E."

Concurrently with the establishment of the Livermore Lab-oratory, Lawrence developed what he called his "hobby," inorder to divert his mind from the enormous pressures to whichit was subjected in these years. He became fascinated with thetechnical challenges of color television, and invented some veryingenious solutions to the difficult problems of that field. Un-fortunately, the business problems involved in the financing ofinitially unprofitable color television tube production lineswere more difficult than the technical problems Lawrencetackled and solved, largely by himself. For these reasons, theLawrence "Chromatron" was never put into production in thiscountry. But it is now being sold in Japan, and the SonyCompany announced plans to introduce it into the U.S. marketin 1967.

In the mid-fifties John Lawrence and Dr. Albert Snell,Ernest's personal physician, urged him to shed some of the greatburdens he was carrying. On one occasion Ernest and Molly


Lawrence took a leisurely ocean voyage to India, and it seemedthat the period of rest had greatly relieved the intestinal prob-lems that were aggravated by the pressures under which he hadworked for so long. But the problems were only temporarilyameliorated; surgical treatment was recommended, but it wasunsuccessful. Ernest Lawrence died in a Palo Alto hospitalon August 27, 1958, without recovering consciousness aftermajor surgery.

Lawrence's untimely death at the end of his fifty-seventhyear was a great shock to his wide circle of friends in science,government, and industry. He had led a life of enormous use-fulness to science and his country; his influence was evidentlargely by his example and by the strength of his character. Hehad great admiration for his scientific colleagues who could in-fluence national policies through high administrative office, orby writings, or in public speeches. But he felt that the properway for him to be useful was to let policy makers know that hewas available for consultation on his own personal opinions—never as a spokesman for a pressure group. Leaders in govern-ment and industry respected his distaste for the limelight, andsought his counsel. His long record of success in the difficulttasks he set for himself, and the accuracy of his prognosticationsin diverse fields, made his advice most compelling to those whosought it.

For those who had the good fortune to be close to him bothpersonally and scientifically he will always seem a giant amongmen. At present, when government support for basic scienceappears to be on the wane, one hears more and more frequentlythe lament, "The real difficulty is that there isn't an ErnestLawrence any more."

Lawrence's place in the history of science is secure. He willalways be remembered as the inventor of the cyclotron, butmore importantly, he should be remembered as the inventor


of the modern way of doing science. Element 103 was namedLawrencium by his young associates who discovered it shortlyafter his death. Also following his death, his friends endowedthe Lawrence Hall of Science, to which science teachers fromall over the country will come on year-long fellowships tolearn the most modern methods of teaching their subjects. TheLawrence Hall of Science will soon be in operation, just abovethe Laboratory that Ernest Lawrence founded and nurturedand loved for so long, and that is now appropriately known asthe Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.


HONORS AND DISTINCTIONS

HONORARY DEGREES

Sc.D., University of South Dakota, 1936Sc.D., Stevens Institute of Technology, 1937Sc.D., Yale University, 1937Sc.D., Princeton University, 1937LL.D., University of Michigan, 1938Sc.D., University of Chicago, 1941Sc.D., Harvard University, 1941Sc.D., Rutgers University, 1941LL.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1942Sc.D., McGill University, 1946Sc.D., University of British Columbia, 1947Sc.D., University of Southern California, 1949Sc.D., University of San Francisco, 1949LL.D., University of Glasgow, 1951

AWARDS AND MEDALS

Elliot Cresson Medal of Franklin Institute, 1937Research Corporation Prize and Plaque, 1937Comstock Prize of National Academy of Sciences, 1937Hughes Medal of Royal Society (England), 1937Nobel Prize in Physics, 1939Duddell Medal of Royal Physical Society, 1940William S. Dunn Award, American Legion, 1940National Association of Manufacturers Award, 1940Holley Medal, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1942Copernican Citation, 1943Wheeler Award, 1945Medal for Merit, 1946Medal of Trasenster, Association of Graduate Engineers, Uni-

versity of Liege, Belgium, 1947Officer de la Legion d'Honneur, France, 1948Phi Delta Epsilon Annual Service Award, 1948William Proctor Prize of the Scientific Research Society of Amer-

ica, 1951


Faraday Medal, 1952American Cancer Society Medal, 1954Enrico Fermi Award, 1957Sylvanus Thayer Award, 1958

MEMBER

American Representative at Solvay Congress, Brussels, 1933National Academy of Sciences, 1934American Philosophical Society, 1937Phi Beta KappaSigma XiGamma AlphaAmerican Scandinavian Foundation, 1942Board of Foreign Scholarships, Department of State (Fulbright

Act—79th Congress), 1947Newcomen Society, 1948-1951Physical Society of Japan, 1954Board of Trustees: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1944

Rand Corporation, 1956Board of Directors: Yosemite Park & Curry Company

Monsanto Chemical Company, 1957

FOREIGN MEMBER

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1952

HONORARY MEMBER

Bohemian Club (California), 1940California Academy of Sciences, 1940Academy of Science, USSR, 1943Royal Irish Academy of Science, 1948

FELLOW

American Physical SocietyAmerican Association for the Advancement of ScienceAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences


HONORARY FELLOW

Leland Stanford Junior University, 1941National Institute of Sciences of India, 1941The Institute of Medicine of Chicago, 1941Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1946The Physical Society, 1948Indian Academy of Sciences, 1953

APPOINTMENTS

National Defense Research Committee, June 1940National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council Re-

viewing Committee, April 1941Office of Scientific Research and Development, 1941Program Chief, S-l Section of the Office of Scientific Research and

Development (Uranium Section), November 1941-May 1942S-l Executive Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and

Development, May 1942-March 30, 1946Scientific Adviser and Project Leader, Manhattan District, May 1,

1943Research Board for National Security, 1945-1946Elector, The Hall of Fame of New York University, 1947Adviser to the U.S. Delegation to the International Conference

on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, Geneva, Switzerland,August 1955

Physical Science Administration Officer (Consultant), BrusselsUniversal International Exhibition of 1958, Department of State,1956-1958

U.S. Delegation to the Conference of Experts to Study the Possi-bility of Detecting Violations of a Possible Agreement on Sus-pension of Nuclear Tests, Geneva, Switzerland, July 1958 (three-member committee appointed by President Eisenhower)


BIBLIOGRAPHY

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS

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1930

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1931

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1932

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1933

Disintegration of boron by swiftly moving protons. Phys. Rev.,43:304-5.

With M. S. Livingston. The disintegration of aluminum byswiftly moving protons. Phys. Rev., 43:369.

With G. N. Lewis and M. S. Livingston. The emission of alpha-particles from various targets bombarded by deutons of highspeed. Phys. Rev., 44:55-56.

With G. N. Lewis and M. S. Livingston. The emission of protonsfrom various targets bombarded by deutons of high speed.Phys. Rev., 44:56.

With M. S. Livingston and M. C. Henderson. Neutrons fromdeutons and the mass of the neutron. Phys. Rev., 44:781-82.

With M. S. Livingston and M. C. Henderson. Neutrons fromberyllium bombarded by deutons. Phys. Rev., 44:782-83.

1934

With M. S. Livingston. The emission of protons and neutronsfrom various targets bombarded by three million volt deu-tons. Phys. Rev., 45:220.

With G. N. Lewis, M. S. Livingston, and M. C. Henderson. Thedisintegration of deutons by high speed protons and the in-stability of the deuton. Phys. Rev., 45:242-44.

With M. C. Henderson and M. S. Livingston. Artificial radio-activity produced by deuton bombardment. Phys. Rev., 45:428-29.

With G. N. Lewis, M. S. Livingston, and M. C. Henderson. Onthe hypothesis of the instability of the deuton. Phys. Rev.,45:497.

With M. S. Livingston. The multiple acceleration of ions tovery high speeds. Phys. Rev., 45:608-12.

With M. C. Henderson and M. S. Livingston. The transmutation


of fluorine by proton bombardment and the mass of fluorine19. Phys. Rev., 46:38-42.

With M. Stanley Livingston and Malcolm C. Henderson. Radio-activity artificially induced by neutron bombardment. Proc.Nat. Acad. Sci., 20:470-75.

Radioactive sodium produced by deuton bombardment. Phys.Rev., 46:746.

1935

Transmutations of sodium by deutons. Phys. Rev., 47:17-27.With E. McMillan and M. C. Henderson. Transmutations of

nitrogen by deutons. Phys. Rev., 47:273-77.With E. McMillan. Transmutations of aluminum by deutons.

Phys. Rev., 47:343-48.With E. McMillan and R. L. Thornton. A new type of excitation

function for nuclear reactions. Science, 81:421-22.With E. McMillan and R. L. Thornton. The transmutation

functions for some cases of deuteron-induced radioactivity.Phys. Rev., 48:493-99.

Artificial radioactivity. Ohio Journal of Science, 35:388-405.

1936

With John H. Lawrence. The biological action of neutron rays.Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 22:124-33.

With J. M. Cork. The transmutation of platinum by deuterons.Phys. Rev., 49:788-92.

With John H. Lawrence and Paul C. Aebersold. Comparativeeffects of x-rays and neutrons on normal and tumor tissue.Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 22:543-57.

With Donald Cooksey. On the apparatus for the multiple ac-celeration of light ions to high speeds. Phys. Rev., 50:1131-40.

1937

With John H. Lawrence and Paul C. Aebersold. The comparativeeffect of neutrons and x-rays on normal and neoplastic tissue.American Association for the Advancement of Science Oc-casional Publication, No. 4, pp. 215-19.

The biological action of neutron rays. Radiology, 29:313-22.


Science and technology. Rev. Sci. Instr., 8:311-13; Science, 86:295-98.

With Donald Cooksey. An improved cyclotron. Science, 86:411.Response by Professor Ernest O. Lawrence. (Acceptance speech

upon presentation of the Comstock Prize.) Science, 86:406-7.

1938

The cyclotron and the elementary course in electricity. Ameri-can Physics Teacher, 6:280-81.

With P. F. Hahn, W. F. Bale, and G. H. Whipple. Radioactiveiron and its metabolism in anemia. Journal of the AmericanMedical Association, 111:2285-86.

1939

Atoms, new and old. In: Science in Progress, 1st Ser., ed. byG. A. Baitsell, pp. 1-34. New Haven, Yale University Press.

With P. F. Hahn, W. F. Bale, and G. H. Whipple. Radioactiveiron and its metabolism in anemia—its absorption, transporta-tion, and utilization. Journal of Experimental Medicine,69:739-53.

With Luis W. Alvarez, Wm. M. Brobeck, Donald Cooksey, DaleR. Corson, Edwin M. McMillan, W. W. Salisbury, and RobertL. Thorton. Initial performance of the 60-inch cyclotron ofthe William H. Crocker Radiation Laboratory, University ofCalifornia. Phys. Rev., 56:124.

The medical cyclotron of the William H. Crocker RadiationLaboratory. Science, 90:407-8.

1940

Acceptance of the Nobel Prize Award. In: The 1939 Nobel PrizeAward in Physics to Ernest Orlando Lawrence, pp. 33-36.Berkeley, University of California Press.

Response. (Acceptance speech upon presentation of the NobelPrize.) Science, 91:329-30.

1941

The new frontiers in the atom. Smithsonian Institution, AnnualReport, 1941, pp. 163-73; Science, 94:221-25.


1942

Nuclear physics and biology. In: Molecular Films, the Cyclo-tron and the New Biology, pp. 63-86. New Brunswick, RutgersUniversity Press.

1946

High energy physics. In: The United States and the United Na-tions, Rept. Ser. 5, The International Control of Atomic En-ergy; Scientific Information Transmitted to the United NationsAtomic Energy Commission, June 14, 1946—October 14, 1946,Vol. 2, pp. 87-90. Washington, D.C., United States GovernmentPrinting Office.

1947

With W. M. Brobeck, K. R. MacKenzie, E. M. McMillan, R.Serber, D. C. Sewell, K. M. Simpson, and R. L. Thornton.Initial performance of the 184-inch cyclotron of the Universityof California. Phys. Rev., 61:449-50.

1948

High energy physics. (Silliman Lecture, 1947.) American Scien-tist, 36:41-49. (See 1949.)

A progress report on the cyclotron. Science, 108:677.

1949

High energy physics. In: Science in Progress, 6th Ser., ed. byG. A. Baitsell, pp. 55-79. New Haven, Yale University Press.

High energy physics. In: Centennial of the Scheffield ScientificSchool, ed. by G. A. Baitsell, pp. 1-26. New Haven, Yale Univer-sity Press.

1951

The evolution of the cyclotron. In: Nobel Lectures: Physics,pp. 430-43. Amsterdam, Elsevier Publishing Company.

1953

With John S. Foster and E. J. Lofgren. A high vacuum highspeed ion pump. Rev. Sci. Instr., 24:388-90.


1955

High-current accelerators. Science, 122:1127-32.Men and atoms. California Monthly, 66(4):24-27.

1958

Science and the national welfare. In: Proceedings of The RobertA. Welch Foundation Conferences on Chemical Research. I.The Structure of the Nucleus, ed. by W. O. Milligan, pp.163-68. Houston, The Robert A. Welch Foundation.

The growth of the Physics Department. In: Symposium on thePhysical and Earth Sciences—Honoring the Twenty-fifth Presi-dential Year of Robert Gordon Sproul, pp. 12-27. Berkeley,University of California Printing Department.

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Ernest O. Lawrence - National Academy of Sciencesnasonline.org/.../memoir-pdfs/lawrence-ernest.pdf · ERNEST ORLANDO LAWRENCE 253 At Minnesota, Lawrence came under the influence of