The Lawrence family was pious in the manner of northern Midwestern Lutherans, religion serving as much as the warp and woof of the community fabric as a source of personal succor or theological speculation. Carl taught a Bible class in the Sunday school, but throughout their married life, it would be the role of his wife, Gunda, to maintain a socially conservative atmosphere in the household and Carl’s role to flout it cheerfully, if carefully. Ernest’s younger brother, John, would recall his father’s partaking of the occasional cigar and even the occasional scotch, and observing with a grin, “If a man doesn’t have some bad habits—at least one or two bad habits—there’s something wrong with him.”
Ernest was, as Gunda recalled, a handful. “He was born grown up” was her pet description of her willful and self-reliant elder son. A family yarn told of the time that he demanded to visit a cousin in Sioux City, Iowa, seventy miles from home, on his own. As he was only eight, Gunda rejected the idea out of hand. (“You’re just a little bit of a boy,” she told him.) Carl reasoned tolerantly that Ernest could ride the train to Sioux City to see his cousin and return the same way. “Mother, let him try his wings,” he told his wife, and his view prevailed. Ernest’s even temperament, his disinclination to brood over setbacks or overdramatize failure, his composure in the face of challenges that might undo a more emotional soul—whether they involved money or technology—surely was rooted in the serenity of his Midwestern upbringing. The one crack in his placid bearing was a persistent stutter. Family opinion held that this reflected not emotional frustration, as post-Freudians might have it today, but a mind that worked so quickly that his thoughts raced ahead of his ability to express them in speech. The stutter was largely cured by a speech therapist during his early teens, although it would resurface occasionally in adulthood, typically at moments of intellectual excitement.
Photographs from Ernest’s adolescence portray a handsome young boy, with his mother’s full lips and his father’s expressive blue eyes. His slightly bucktoothed grin projected an easy self-confidence; the round spectacles he wore from his schooldays gave him a professorial air even then. He was a tall youth whose clothes hung loosely on his bony frame, as though waiting patiently for him to grow into them. Ernest would inherit his father’s vigor but perhaps not all his athletic finesse. His sole year on his school’s football team yielded a bump on the forehead visible even in adulthood. Later in life, his enthusiastic enjoyment of weekend skiing and hiking often would be evidenced by his limping into the lab on crutches come Monday. He would terrify passengers with his breakneck piloting of a succession of roadsters and speedboats, and his notable success on the tennis court would owe more to his tireless and aggressive style than to refined technique.
• • •
Ernie and Merle became steadily more enthralled with electronics, especially the emerging technology of radio transmission. Characteristically, Ernest’s interest manifested itself through hands-on tinkering—one day he took the opportunity of his mother’s absence from home to mount a telegraph key in holes drilled through her dining room table—and Merle’s through diligent perusal of hobbyist magazines such as Modern Electrics and The Electrical Experimenter. It was a difference in approaches that would follow them throughout their careers.
Radio was in its infancy. Transmission was dependent on spark-gap generators that operated at low power, produced copious interference, and failed utterly in damp conditions. With the technology yet incapable of carrying information as complex as voice—that would not become practical until the widespread introduction of vacuum tubes after World War I—communication was by telegraph key and Morse code. The system was dependent on the size and power of the antenna, which had to be grounded; Ernest and Merle dug a thirteen-foot hole for their antenna’s ground outside the Tuve house, despite Dr. Tuve’s uneasiness about the electrical project.
The boys spent their free time huddled in the Tuve attic, surrounded by cast-off batteries, glass tubes, and coils of wire. In 1917 they were tempted to imagine they were capturing messages destined for warships or submarines at sea. That was especially so when they tuned in radio station POZ, a station in Nauen, Germany, which had established a famous milestone in 1913 by transmitting a readable signal 1,550 miles—almost enough to blanket the European continent. But the fun ended abruptly late one night shortly after the United States entered the war, when Dr. Tuve discovered Merle copying down Morse code in the attic. President Woodrow Wilson had decreed that private wireless transmissions must cease for the duration, and despite Merle’s protestations that he had only been receiving, not transmitting, his infuriated father informed him, “When the president says something, you obey.” He demanded on the spot that Merle dismantle the equipment and pack it all away in its original boxes, which he proceeded to seal with his own hands.
Soon after that, college beckoned. Having acceded to her husband’s indulgent discipline throughout Ernest’s childhood and adolescence, Gunda now put her foot down, insisting that he attend St. Olaf College, a cloistered Lutheran institution in frigid Northfield, Minnesota. For a boy just turning seventeen, she maintained, the important thing was to keep him sequestered from “the wickedness of the state university.”
Predictably, Ernest found St. Olaf a stultifying place. He bristled at the hours wasted in Bible study, chapel, and military drill. Other than a chemistry class that kept him marginally interested, his grades revealed the hopeless tedium of his life: a C in religion and a D in electricity and magnetism—fields, as family members would wryly observe years later, in which he was destined to become a world authority.
That was the end of Ernest’s St. Olaf experience. For the summer of 1919, he found himself a laborer’s job in Vermillion, South Dakota, the seat of the state university. Vermillion was a mere fifty miles from the family home but a world apart; stealthily, he enrolled at the University of South Dakota for his sophomore year and presented the transfer to his parents as a fait accompli.
At USD, Lawrence encountered his first truly inspiring teacher. He was Lewis Ellsworth Akeley, an implausibly cosmopolitan figure on the rural campus. Akeley hailed from a prominent and adventurous family in upstate New York: his brother was the noted explorer and conservationist Carl Akeley. In Vermillion, Lewis Akeley taught a broad-minded curriculum of chemistry, physics, Latin, and physiology. Ernest had sought him out to pitch the establishment of a campus wireless station. So taken with Lawrence’s enthusiasm that he burbled the new student’s praises to his wife the evening after their first encounter, Akeley invited him back for another meeting and artfully steered him away from premedical study and into physics. He would hold up Ernest as an example to his other students—sometimes to an embarrassing degree. “There’s a fellow here, and I want you to all take a look at him,” Akeley told his class on one occasion, so vivid in the memory of one student that he could recount it to John Lawrence four decades later. “That’s Ernest Lawrence. He’s going to be famous someday.”
After receiving his bachelor’s degree, Ernest moved on to graduate study at the University of Minnesota, where Merle Tuve was already enrolled. As if by an act of providence, Ernest promptly came within the orbit of a genuinely free-thinking pioneer of advanced physics. His name was William Francis Gray Swann.
At thirty-eight, Swann ranked as one of the nation’s leading experts in the theory of relativity, a subject on which he had maintained a lengthy personal correspondence with Einstein himself. An imposing figure with an aquiline nose and penetrating eyes glaring from beneath heavy, dark eyebrows, Swann was a highly cultured individual, sufficiently accomplished on the cello that it had been a close call whether he would make his professional career in science or music.
Born in the West Midlands of England, Swann had crossed the Atlantic in 1913 to join the Department of Terrestrial Management of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, an independent center for scientific research founded in 1902 by the steel baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Swann had moved on to t
he University of Minnesota in 1918, but would not stay long. Starting the year after Lawrence met him, his renown as a theorist would land him appointments first at the University of Chicago and then at Yale University’s Sloane Physics Laboratory as director. Lawrence would tag along at each step.
Swann’s pedagogical approach was conspicuously nonconformist. Disdaining what he called the “cult for the glorification of facts,” he viewed the proper goal of physics education to be the inculcation of a certain “attitude of mind”: a spirit of mental inquiry that would guide the student to an understanding of the natural phenomena underlying abstract principles. Facts, he maintained, could always be retrieved from reference books or recalled through simple laboratory procedures; it was creativity that must be stimulated in the student, because that is what opens the door to the realm of ideas. Years later, Swann would write: “I like to think that if I should go to bed tonight and wake up in the morning to find that I had forgotten everything that I had ever learned, but had succeeded in retaining such experience as I have in thinking, I should not have suffered very much by the loss.”
One can see Ernest Lawrence’s career as a recapitulation of Swann’s precepts in action. Lawrence would never allow established facts to stand in the way of an idea if the latter conformed better to his perception of the natural world; as a result, he would remake the world of ideas again and again. Numerous times he would be informed by colleagues with more eminent credentials than his own that the facts as they were commonly understood militated against his own intuition; in almost every case, he would follow his hunch. Often enough, and sometimes spectacularly, he would succeed in showing that the “facts” were wrong.
Swann also may have bequeathed Lawrence another lesson, this one negative. For Swann’s frequent moves from institution to institution hinted at an aspect of his personality that offset his blazing intellect: he had a tendency to rub his peers the wrong way. “Swann was unhappy anywhere he could not be the prima donna,” recalled the Berkeley physicist Leonard B. Loeb, who was a faculty colleague of Swann’s at Chicago. To be a Swann loyalist, as Lawrence was, meant being prepared to pack one’s academic bags on short notice. It was an uncongenial existence for someone who had been raised in a stable, close-knit family environment. Unlike his mentor, Lawrence would be an academic homebody all his life, preferring to remain in place rather than move on. For months, he would resist Berkeley’s blandishments to leave Yale, despite the obvious benefits associated with writing his own ticket. Once he reached Berkeley, new offers would come almost every year; Lawrence would give some of these careful consideration while making sure to let Berkeley know that he would rather stay, if the university would only give him a little bit more freedom and resources. Whether he seriously entertained the offers that came his way from institutions as august as Harvard University is hard to say; but in the end, he turned them all down.
Swann helped Lawrence apply his raw tinker’s skills to the fashioning of effective experimental equipment. The process began with Swann’s interest in a particular phenomenon of electromagnetism. This was the unipolar effect, which concerned the electromagnetic field associated with a cylindrical magnet spinning along its lengthwise axis—that is, rotating like a top, with one pole remaining in contact with the table and the other facing up into the air. Swann assigned Lawrence to design an experiment to investigate the effect, acknowledging cheerfully that previous efforts all had yielded inconclusive results. “Every two years, someone comes up with an experiment in which he rotates a magnet or something and expects to get the effect he wanted, but he doesn’t and can’t understand why,” he told Lawrence. “We’ll shed some light in the darkness.”
Lawrence built an elegant mechanism out of brass and steel. His speed in designing and building the apparatus was more impressive than the results he obtained, which matched Swann’s expectations and therefore advanced science by a tiny increment, if at all. Nevertheless, he did get results, which was encouraging enough; the more so in that his report constituted his master’s thesis. Swann delivered the thesis to the Philosophical Magazine, which published it in 1924 as Ernest Orlando Lawrence’s very first scientific paper.
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Yale, to which Lawrence followed Swann in 1924, was a significant step up from Minnesota in intellectual atmosphere. The peerless laboratory facilities and distinguished faculty of New Haven, Connecticut, attracted an especially promising crop of young researchers. Among them was Donald Cooksey, an urbane Californian whose brother, Charlton, was a member of the Yale physics faculty. The younger Cooksey was a competent physicist then investigating the elusive qualities of X-rays, but he knew he was no match for the newcomer.
“He was different,” Cooksey would recall. “He was aggressive, interested, and knowing.” Lawrence was also, in Cooksey’s eyes, still very much a hayseed. “He had an engaging naiveté about the East. He had never seen a skyscraper.” The bonds forged then between the two young scientists would last all their lives. Cooksey educated Lawrence in the ways of cosmopolitan society, but his real calling would be as Lawrence’s lifelong acolyte and deputy—codesigner of some of Lawrence’s most sophisticated accelerators, manager of Lawrence’s laboratory, guardian of Lawrence’s legacy after his death. From Cooksey’s standpoint, it would be the perfect relationship. “I knew that I would never be a great physicist,” he acknowledged many years later. “But I thought I might be of some help to one who, it seemed obvious to me, would become one.”
At Yale, Lawrence’s closest research collaborator was Jesse Beams, another rural Midwesterner—his grandparents had migrated from West Virginia to Kansas in a covered wagon. Like Ernest, who received his doctorate from Yale in 1925, Beams was a newly minted PhD. Their joint project was exceptionally ambitious and, for reasons that scientists would not fully comprehend for another year or two, doomed to failure. Their goal was to investigate the structure of light by measuring the interval from the moment a quantum particle of light, a photon, strikes a target to the emission of an electron from its surface. They also were attempting to “chop” photons into pieces by passing light beams through a rapidly rotating mirror. The project neatly combined work each had been doing previously—Lawrence’s research under Swann into the photoelectric effect in gas vapor and Beams’s investigation of short-lived physical phenomena. “We decided that if you could take some of the apparatus I’d been using and some of the apparatus he’d been using and we put these two together, we could get some idea of how long the quanta was,” Beams related.
The results they obtained were perplexing. Sometimes the light quanta seemed to measure out at three or four meters long; sometimes they appeared to be “just a little bundle of energy,” Beams recalled. In fact, they had encountered the same wave-particle duality of light that was confounding their elders in physics.
The paper they eventually published described their confusion in neutral technical language, but still their disappointment leaked through. “There is no definite information on the length of time elapsing during the process of absorption of a quantum of energy photo-electrically by an electron,” they reported, “and the so-called length of a light quantum—if such a concept has meaning—is equally unknown experimentally.” For all that, the pair did succeed in measuring the time lag of the photoelectric effect at about two billionths of a second. As this was much shorter than the figure proposed by such eminent theoreticians as Niels Bohr, the results represented a gutsy challenge from two young scientists with the ink barely dry on their doctorates. Their figures held up, however, and would be confirmed decades later by more sophisticated measuring equipment than they had at hand in 1926.
Jesse Beams’s yearlong collaboration with Ernest Lawrence left him with a lasting impression of Lawrence’s inexhaustible vigor. “He worked me to death, practically,” Beams recalled. Their experiments sometimes required equipment running under close supervision round the clock for days, yet Ernest seemed to have no trouble finding time and energy fo
r dates or games of tennis or squash, or a Sunday ride on a spirited horse from the Yale stables. In this period, he also began to pay serious attentions to the sixteen-year-old daughter of George Blumer, Yale’s medical school dean. Mary Blumer—or Molly, as she was known—was an attractive teenager and a brilliant student destined to lead her class at Vassar College and obtain a place at Harvard Medical School. At first she resisted the attentions of the tall, impossibly thin and rather unsophisticated Ernest Lawrence, whose distracted air set her sister Elsie to giggling; he was the sort of boy who could fall into a reverie in the midst of tying his shoelaces. But Molly soon gave in to his vitality, his intelligence, and the tenacity of his courtship.
Lawrence’s precocious talent for experimentation and his engaging character were already attracting attention from recruiters in academia and industry. He published prolifically; his areas of interest, which included the propagation of electron beams and their usefulness as ionization agents, were among the most intriguing in physics; and his resourceful laboratory technique was widely praised. At General Electric’s laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where he and Beams had been invited to spend two successive summers by Albert W. Hull, the company’s top research executive, he showed such a facile grasp of even the most recondite technical problems that he was given a brief as “a sort of roving ambassador” to peer over the shoulders of older researchers and make suggestions where needed.
In the spring of 1926, a scout dispatched to the Washington conference of the American Physical Society, the leading professional organization, reported home: “I felt out one of the most brilliant experimental young men in the East—a lad whose name is on everyone’s lips on account of his recent papers on Ionizing Potentials . . . [and] personally one of the most charming men I have met—a first class mathematician and thoroughly alive.” The scout was Leonard B. Loeb, professor of physics at the University of California. Berkeley’s quest to land Ernest Lawrence was about to begin.
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