Ernest Lawrence

His parents, both children of Norwegian immigrants, met teaching at the high school in Canton, South Dakota, where his father was superintendent of schools. He started at St. Olaf, transferred to the University of South Dakota, took a chemistry degree in 1922 and a physics master's at Minnesota the next year, then followed his adviser to Chicago and to Yale, where he finished a doctorate on the photoelectric effect in 1925. A National Research Council fellowship could have sent him to Europe, as it sent everyone. He stayed. Berkeley and Washington offered assistant professorships at 3,500 dollars and Yale matched the rank at 3,000, so he took the smaller money and the older name. The faculty resented him anyway, for never having taught and for South Dakota.

He was reading in the Berkeley library one evening in 1929 when a diagram in a German journal stopped him: a machine that pushed particles to higher energy in a straight line, growing longer with every push. Curl it up, he thought, and set a magnet across it. The first cyclotron was four inches across, made of brass, wire and sealing wax, and cost about 25 dollars. Every success bought a bigger one, 11 inches, then 27 around an 80-ton magnet he found rusting in a Palo Alto junkyard, then 37, then 60. The Nobel came in 1939. In the war he turned the machines into calutrons, and the plant built around them at Oak Ridge, wound with 14,700 tons of silver, separated the uranium for the Hiroshima bomb.

The machines outran the physics. At the 1933 Solvay conference he announced a possible source of limitless energy, and James Chadwick told him, in an accent Lawrence heard as condescension, that he was looking at contamination of his own apparatus. Chadwick was right. Rutherford and Mark Oliphant then worked out what the Berkeley results actually showed, which was deuterium fusing into helium-3, a discovery Lawrence's people had held in their hands and not seen. He hired Emilio Segrè, who had just discovered an element, at 300 dollars a month, and cut it to 116 on learning that Segrè was legally stranded in California. He named his own son after Robert Oppenheimer, then barred Oppenheimer's brother from the laboratory, and when the security hearing came he stayed away ill while a transcript of his criticism was read in his place.

Eisenhower asked him to Geneva in July 1958 to help negotiate a nuclear test ban. The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission had pushed for his inclusion precisely because Lawrence favored continued testing. He went with his ulcerative colitis flaring, collapsed there, and was flown back to Stanford, where surgeons removed much of his large intestine and found an artery badly furred with plaque. He died on August 27, 1958, 19 days after his 57th birthday. Within days the Regents put his name on two University of California laboratories, and in 1961 Berkeley named element 103 lawrencium. Through the 1980s his widow petitioned those same Regents to take his name off the Livermore weapons laboratory. They refused every time.

Ernest Lawrence's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The first cyclotron invention
  Four inches across, in brass, wire and sealing wax, built with Niels Edlefsen 1930
• Method and apparatus for the acceleration of ions patent
  US patent 1,948,384, assigned to the Research Corporation 1934
• The Berkeley Radiation Laboratory company
  Made a department of the University of California on July 1, 1936, with him as director 1936
• The 60-inch cyclotron invention
  It made the isotopes for the first neutron therapy on a cancer patient that November 1939
• The calutron invention
  California university cyclotron — the electromagnetic uranium separator built at Oak Ridge 1943
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory company
  The second weapons laboratory he and Edward Teller argued into being 1952

• 1922 aged ~21 Takes a chemistry degree at the University of South Dakota He had spent his first year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota.
• 1925 aged ~24 Finishes a Yale doctorate on the photoelectric effect in potassium vapor He turned down the customary year in Europe and stayed put.
• 1928 aged ~27 Hired at Berkeley, and made a full professor two years later He was the youngest professor at the university.
• 1929 aged ~28 Sees Rolf Widerøe's accelerator diagram in a journal in the Berkeley library He worked out that the same principle could be coiled inside a magnet.
• January 2, 1931 aged 29 Milton Stanley Livingston spins protons in the 11-inch cyclotron A week later it reached 1.22 million electron volts on 3,000 volts of input.
• May 14, 1932 aged 30 Marries Mary Blumer at New Haven They had six children. He named one of them after Robert Oppenheimer.
• November 1939 aged 38 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the cyclotron The ceremony was held in Berkeley on February 29, 1940, because of the war.
• July 16, 1945 aged 43 Watches the Trinity test with James Chadwick Few were more elated by it.
• August 27, 1958 aged 57 Dies at Palo Alto Hospital, 19 days after his 57th birthday

• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. friend, then estranged
• Edward Teller 1908–2003
  Physicist and advocate of the hydrogen bomb whose work and policy influence shaped Cold War science and defense. backed his second weapons laboratory
• Chien-Shiung Wu 1912–1997
  Experimental physicist whose decisive work on parity violation transformed particle physics and challenged assumptions about natural symmetry. doctoral student
• Glenn T. Seaborg 1912–1999
  Co-discovered plutonium and nine other transuranium elements and chaired the Atomic Energy Commission. used his cyclotron to find plutonium
• Vannevar Bush 1890–1974
  Built the differential analyzer and directed U.S. wartime research while proposing the Memex concept. wartime patron