58 Facts About Ernest Lawrence

Ernest Orlando Lawrence was an American nuclear physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron.

Ernest Lawrence is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, as well as for founding the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Ernest Lawrence contemplated how it could be made compact, and came up with an idea for a circular accelerating chamber between the poles of an electromagnet.

Ernest Lawrence went on to build a series of ever larger and more expensive cyclotrons.

Ernest Lawrence strongly backed Edward Teller's campaign for a second nuclear weapons laboratory, which Ernest Lawrence located in Livermore, California.

Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born in Canton, South Dakota, on August 8,1901.

Ernest Lawrence had a younger brother, John H Lawrence, who would become a physician, and was a pioneer in the field of nuclear medicine.

Ernest Lawrence attended the public schools of Canton and Pierre, then enrolled at St Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, but transferred after a year to the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.

Ernest Lawrence followed Swann to the University of Chicago, and then to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where Ernest Lawrence completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics in 1925 as a Sloane Fellow, writing his doctoral thesis on the photoelectric effect in potassium vapor.

Ernest Lawrence was elected a member of Sigma Xi, and, on Swann's recommendation, received a National Research Council fellowship.

In 1926 and 1927, Ernest Lawrence received offers of assistant professorships from the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California at a salary of $3,500 per annum.

Ernest Lawrence chose to stay at the more prestigious Yale, but because he had never been an instructor, the appointment was resented by some of his fellow faculty, and in the eyes of many it still did not compensate for his South Dakota immigrant background.

Ernest Lawrence was hired as an associate professor of physics at the University of California in 1928, and two years later became a full professor, becoming the university's youngest professor.

Robert Gordon Sproul, who became university president the day after Ernest Lawrence became a professor, was a member of the Bohemian Club, and he sponsored Ernest Lawrence's membership in 1932.

Ernest Lawrence named his son Robert after theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, his closest friend in Berkeley.

In 1919, the New Zealand physicist Ernest Lawrence Rutherford had fired alpha particles into nitrogen and had succeeded in knocking protons out of some of the nuclei.

Ernest Lawrence saw that such a particle accelerator would soon become too long and unwieldy for his university laboratory.

In pondering a way to make the accelerator more compact, Ernest Lawrence decided to set a circular accelerating chamber between the poles of an electromagnet.

Ernest Lawrence excitedly told his colleagues that he had discovered a method for obtaining particles of very high energy without the use of any high voltage.

In what would become a recurring pattern, as soon as there was the first sign of success, Ernest Lawrence started planning a new, bigger machine.

On learning about it, Ernest Lawrence sent a wire to Berkeley and asked for Cockcroft and Walton's results to be verified.

Ernest Lawrence received a patent for the cyclotron in 1934, which he assigned to the Research Corporation, a private foundation that funded much of Lawrence's early work.

The Radiation Laboratory became an official department of the University of California on July 1,1936, with Ernest Lawrence formally appointed its director, with a full-time assistant director, and the university agreed to make $20,000 a year available for its research activities.

At Cockcroft's invitation, Ernest Lawrence attended the 1933 Solvay Conference in Belgium.

Ernest Lawrence was asked to give a presentation on the cyclotron.

Ernest Lawrence ran into withering skepticism from the Cavendish Laboratory's James Chadwick, the physicist who had discovered the neutron in 1932, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1935.

When he returned to Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence mobilized his team to go painstakingly over the results to gather enough evidence to convince Chadwick.

Ernest Lawrence's response was to press on with the creation of still larger cyclotrons.

Ernest Lawrence found that the radioactive phosphorus concentrated in the fast-growing cancer cells.

Ernest Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in November 1939 "for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it, especially with regard to artificial radioactive elements".

Ernest Lawrence was the first at Berkeley as well as the first South Dakotan to become a Nobel Laureate, and the first to be so honored while at a state-supported university.

Ernest Lawrence helped recruit staff for the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where American physicists developed the cavity magnetron invented by Oliphant's team in Britain.

Ernest Lawrence became involved in recruiting staff for underwater sound laboratories to develop techniques for detecting German submarines.

However, when Ernest Lawrence learned that Segre was legally trapped in California, he reduced Segre's salary further to US$116 a month.

Ernest Lawrence had already thought about the problem of separating the fissile isotope uranium-235 from uranium-238, a process known today as uranium enrichment.

Ernest Lawrence began converting his old 37-inch cyclotron into a giant mass spectrometer.

On July 16,1945, Lawrence observed the Trinity nuclear test of the first atomic bomb with Chadwick and Charles A Thomas.

Ernest Lawrence hoped that the Manhattan Project would develop improved calutrons and construct Alpha III racetracks, but they were judged to be uneconomical.

Ernest Lawrence was a forceful advocate of Big Science with its requirements for big machines and big money, and in 1946 he asked the Manhattan Project for over $2 million for research at the Radiation Laboratory.

Ernest Lawrence had a most unusual intuitive approach to involved physical problems, and when explaining new ideas to him, one quickly learned not to befog the issue by writing down the differential equation that might appear to clarify the situation.

That year, Ernest Lawrence asked for $15 million for his projects, which included a new linear accelerator and a new gigaelectronvolt synchrotron which became known as the bevatron.

Notwithstanding the fact that he voted for Franklin Roosevelt, Ernest Lawrence was a Republican, who had strongly disapproved of Oppenheimer's efforts before the war to unionize the Radiation Laboratory workers, which Ernest Lawrence considered "leftwandering activities".

Ernest Lawrence considered political activity to be a waste of time better spent in scientific research, and preferred that it be kept out of the Radiation Laboratory.

Ernest Lawrence was protective of individuals in his laboratory, but even more protective of the reputation of the laboratory.

Ernest Lawrence was forced to defend Radiation Laboratory staff members like Robert Serber who were investigated by the university's Personnel Security Board.

However, Ernest Lawrence barred Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank from the Radiation Laboratory, damaging his relationship with Robert.

When hearings were held to revoke Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance, Ernest Lawrence declined to attend on account of illness, but a transcript in which he was critical of Oppenheimer was presented in his absence.

Ernest Lawrence was alarmed by the Soviet Union's first nuclear test in August 1949.

Ernest Lawrence proposed to use accelerators instead of nuclear reactors to produce the neutrons needed to create the tritium the bomb required, as well as plutonium, which was more difficult, as much higher energies would be required.

Ernest Lawrence first proposed the construction of Mark I, a prototype $7 million, 25 MeV linear accelerator, codenamed Materials Test Accelerator.

Ernest Lawrence was talking about a new, even larger MTA known as the Mark II, which could produce tritium or plutonium from depleted uranium-238.

Serber and Segre attempted in vain to explain the technical problems that made it impractical, but Ernest Lawrence felt that they were being unpatriotic.

Ernest Lawrence strongly backed Edward Teller's campaign for a second nuclear weapons laboratory, which Ernest Lawrence proposed to locate with the MTA Mark I at Livermore, California.

Ernest Lawrence was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1934, and both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1937.

Ernest Lawrence was made an Officer of the Legion d'Honneur in 1948, and was the first recipient of the Sylvanus Thayer Award by the US Military Academy in 1958.

Ernest Lawrence died in Palo Alto Hospital on August 27,1958, nineteen days after his 57th birthday.

Ernest Lawrence's papers are in the Bancroft Library at the University of California in Berkeley.

Ernest Lawrence outlived her husband by more than 44 years and died in Walnut Creek, California, at the age of 92 on January 6,2003.