What if Rolf Wideröe had not published an article on the acceleration of potassium ions in 1928? What if Ernest had not come across it in the library one day and managed to understand the general principles even though he couldn’t read German very well? What if Niels Edlefsen had not been persuaded to build the first Berkeley accelerator, that messy little glob of glass and sealing wax? . . . What if Stan Livingston had not undertaken the task of building larger accelerators and come up with some very ingenious solutions to some of the knotty problems that arose? What if that wonderfully inspired, dedicated, hard-working, long-suffering bunch of young people had not gravitated to Berkeley to work night and day, Sundays and holidays, for their demanding maestro? What if Robert Gordon Sproul had been an old fuddy-duddy of a university president instead of a young, dynamic one? . . .
What if any of these substantial elements in the success of the Laboratory had been lacking? What if the right people had not had the right ideas at the right time, the right degree of enthusiasm and persistence, at the right time and the right place?
She concluded: “Surely the Radiation Laboratory would not have been founded in 1931 at Berkeley, and we wouldn’t be here tonight celebrating the golden anniversary of those auspicious circumstances. But they did, and it was, so here we are.”
(1) Lawrence family portrait, probably circa 1910. Clockwise, from left: Carl, Ernest, Gunda, John.
(2) A teenage Ernest (center) joyriding with unidentified friends.
(3) Niels Edlefsen’s first cyclotrons, basically glass flasks slathered over with sealing wax. Livingston doubted that these produced the resonant acceleration Lawrence claimed.
(4) M. Stanley Livingston’s 4-inch cyclotron, uncovered to show the interior, including the lone semicircular “dee” and a strip of copper serving as the target. Lawrence and Livingston finally achieved resonant acceleration with this device.
(5) A page from Lawrence’s 1932 cyclotron patent application showing the spiral paths of energized ions (Fig. 1) and the action of the magnetic field to keep them corralled within the dees (Fig. 2).
(6) J. Robert Oppenheimer (left) and Ernest Lawrence in the first, warmest stage of their friendship, at Oppenheimer’s Perro Caliente ranch in New Mexico, probably around 1931.
(7) Chemistry dean Gilbert Lewis was the undisputed head of the Berkeley science faculty when Lawrence arrived.
(8) The first “Rad Lab.” In 1931 Berkeley president Robert Sproul gave Lawrence this ramshackle campus building, slated for demolition, to house the new 27-inch cyclotron. Bill Brobeck later judged its chief virtue to be that “no one objected if you drove a nail into it anywhere.”
(9) The 27-inch, with its Livingston-designed vacuum chamber nestled between the pole faces of its magnet, and its distinctive horseshoe-shaped support yoke. Livingston (at left) is wearing his characteristically somber expression.
(10) The 1933 Solvay Conference on Physics brought together the science’s aristocracy, including a score of current or future Nobel laureates. Lawrence, the sole American invited, is standing, second from right. Among the other notables were (circled, left to right) Erwin Schrodinger, Frederic Joliot, Irene Joliot-Curie, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, E.T.S. Walton, Marie Curie, George Gamow, Ernest Rutherford, Wolfgang Pauli, John Cockcroft, Rudolf Peierls, Lise Meitner, and James Chadwick. Attending but not shown: Albert Einstein.
(11) First-generation Rad Lab scientists and staff, arranged before the 27-inch in 1933: ( from left ) Jack Livingood, Frank Exner, Stan Livingston, David Sloan, Lawrence, Milton White, Wesley Coates, Jackson Laslett, and Telesio Lucci.
(12) Cooksey’s 37-inch vacuum “can” in 1937 brought the machine’s engineering to a new level of precision.
(13) The first external beam was produced on March 26, 1936, by “snouting”—so named because of the pig’s-snout shape of the portal carrying ions out of the vacuum tank. By November 1937, when this photo was taken, the beam was refined to the point that it allowed experimentation far from the interfering field of the cyclotron and treated visitors to thrilling displays of its lavender glow.
(14) The second Rad Lab. Built in 1938 with money from Berkeley regent William Crocker, the Crocker lab housed the new 60-inch atom smasher—the “Crocker Cracker”—in its two-story rear wing.
(15) Rad Lab staff and associates seated in the lap of the magnet yoke of the 60-inch, under construction in the still-skeletal Crocker Lab. Physicist Maurice Goldhaber compared this Big Science photograph to his memories of Ernest Rutherford holding his experimental apparatus in his own lap. Front row, left to right: John Lawrence, Robert Serber, Franz Kurie, Raymond T. Birge, Ernest Lawrence, Don Cooksey, Arthur Snell, Luis Alvarez, Philip Abelson. Second row: John Backus, Wilfred Mann, Pail Aebersold, Edwin McMillan, Ernest Lyman, Martin Kamen, David Kalbfell, Winfield Salisbury. Back row: Alex Langsdorf, Sam Simmons, Joseph Hamilton, David Sloan, J. Robert Oppenheimer, William Brobeck, Robert Cornog, Robert R. Wilson, Eugene Viez, Jack Livingood.
(16) Bill Brobeck in 1938, next to discards from the lab’s neutron-shielding equipment: cans filled with water.
(17) The 60-inch enhanced the lab’s usefulness for the biomedical research that paired Ernest (front)with his brother, John, seen here together at the machine’s control console.
(18) Molly and Ernest on the Crocker Lab stoop with children Margaret and Eric, 1939.
(19) Nobel Laureate, November 9, 1939. The Rad Lab blackboard bears the news, along with the announcement of the celebration to follow. The “L.E.” who wrote the message in the lower left-hand corner was Lorenzo Emo, an Italian count who was among the paid staff.
(20) As the European war made travel to Sweden for the Nobel ceremony impossible, Molly, Ernest, Gunda, John, and Carl celebrated the Nobel the following February at an event in Berkeley.
(21) Iconic photo of America’s scientific elite: Five eminent scientists and administrators meeting with Lawrence to review the grant application for the 184-inch cyclotron on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation, at the Rad Lab, during the last week of March 1940. Less than two years later, they would come together again, this time as the civilian leadership of the atomic bomb program. From left: Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Karl Compton, Alfred Loomis.
(22) Dinners at DiBiasi’s Restaurant in Albany, near the Berkeley campus, were an annual event for Rad Lab members and their guests. This photograph by Donald Cooksey dates from the early 1940s. Helen Griggs, seen at the far right, was Ernest’s secretary and the future Mrs. Glenn Seaborg.
(23) First direct irradiation of a patient, November 20, 1939. Robert Stone of the University of California medical school (left) positions patient Robert Penny at a portal of the 60-inch cyclotron in a room specially constructed for medical treatment, as John Lawrence looks on.
(24) Plotting the campaign for the 184-inch grant? The Rockefeller Foundation’s Warren Weaver (left) confers with Alfred Loomis and Ernest Lawrence in a Washington hotel room in 1940. Loomis’s influence helped Weaver and Lawrence secure the $1.15 million grant, although its size strained the Rockefeller Foundation’s resources.
(25) Crucial meeting of the atomic age, September 22, 1941. Australian physicist Mark Oliphant (left) confers with Lawrence in the shadow of the massive 184-inch cyclotron magnet, awaiting construction of its home in the hillside above the Berkeley campus. Oliphant informed Lawrence that British scientists had determined that an atomic bomb was feasible; three days later, in Chicago, Ernest passed the information to James Conant and Arthur Compton and committed himself personally to the bomb project.
(26) After the reconstituted S-1 committee finally got atomic bomb planning under way, its members met at the exclusive Bohemian Grove in California in September 1942, with Lawrence as host. From left: Harold Urey, Lawrence, James Conant, Lyman Briggs, Eger Murphree, Arthur Compton.
(27) Lawrence donated the unfinished 184-inch to the bomb effort by converting it to a mass spectrograph for the separation of u
ranium isotopes. From left: J. Robert Oppenheimer, newly appointed to head the Manhattan Project’s bomb design lab at Los Alamos; future Nobelist Glenn Seaborg, developing plutonium for the bomb program; and Lawrence inspect the machine’s control console. The separation technique, implemented at Oak Ridge, would produce the uranium core for the Hiroshima bomb.
(28) The “alpha racetracks” like this one at Oak Ridge separated fissionable U-235 from natural uranium at a high volume, though not enough to build more than a single bomb.
(29) Glenn Seaborg (left), working with émigré physicist Emilio Segrè, isolated the “fiendishly toxic” element 94 at the Rad Lab and dubbed it plutonium. In 1966 the discoverers prepared to turn over to the Smithsonian Institution the cigar box in which they deposited their very first sample of the elusive element. The box had been donated by the inveterate cigar smoker Gilbert Lewis.
(30) The Trinity fireball at 25 thousandths of a second after detonation, witnessed by Lawrence and others from a watching post twenty miles from the test site.
(31) Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, inspect the test site after the blast.
(32) Letter handwritten by Luis Alvarez on behalf of himself, Robert Serber, and Phil Morrison of the Rad Lab to their former colleague Ryokichi Sagane, warning of continued nuclear destruction if Japan did not surrender “at once.” The letter was dropped on Nagasaki with the plutonium bomb on August 9, 1945. It failed to reach Sagane until after the war and was returned years later to Alvarez, who put his signature to it and delivered it again to Sagane as a mordant keepsake.
(33) Two patrons meet: As Berkeley president Robert Sproul (right) looks on, General Groves presents Lawrence in March 1946 with the Medal for Merit, then the U.S. government’s highest civilian honor for service to the country. Among other participants in the bomb program to receive the award were Bush, Conant, Fermi, Loomis, and Oppenheimer.
(34) Leaders of Lawrence’s Berkeley and Livermore empire during the postwar bonanza, which enriched the university and secured the Rad Lab’s position as the preeminent center of high-energy physics in the nation, perhaps the world. From left: Glenn Seaborg, Edwin McMillan, Lawrence, Donald Cooksey, Edward Teller, Herbert York, Luis Alvarez.
(35) Finally installed and operating as an accelerator after the war, the 184-inch was big enough to accommodate the burgeoning Rad Lab staff in 1946, when it was converted into a synchrocyclotron to exploit the “phase stability” discovery by Edwin McMillan (standing eleventh from right). Lawrence can be seen seated with his hands clasped on the lower pole face, near the center of the photo, with the omnipresent Cooksey at his left.
(36) Ernest Orlando Lawrence, overlooking the 184-inch cyclotron at what is now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Acknowledgments
* * *
Almost all the men and women who lived the formative years of high-energy physics, the development of the atomic bomb, and the birth of the thermonuclear age with Ernest O. Lawrence have passed on now. But the voices of many of them live on in the remarkable collection of interviews conducted by Herbert Childs for his 1968 authorized biography of Lawrence, An American Genius, and deposited at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Childs’s work and materials, along with Lawrence and His Laboratory, the history of the Radiation Laboratory published by J. L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel in 1969, are among the indispensable starting points for any examination of Lawrence and his times.
So too are the Ernest O. Lawrence Papers at the Bancroft, where Susan Snyder, head of public services, and the rest of the Bancroft staff were unfailingly courteous and helpful during the long hours I spent with these archival materials in the library’s reading room. I am also indebted to Pamela Patterson of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory for her assistance with my request for archival materials at the lab and her hospitality during my visit. The Library of Congress, the Niels Bohr Library and Archives of the American Institute of Physics, and the U.S. Military Academy Library at West Point also afforded me access to important historical materials. Robert Lawrence, Ernest and Molly’s second son, generously provided me with copies of photographs in the family’s possession.
My agent, Sandra Dijkstra, contributed the enthusiasm, advocacy, and faith in this project on which I long ago came to depend. My editor at Simon & Schuster, Thomas LeBien, provided invaluable guidance on structuring the manuscript and shaping the final product.
Finally but most importantly, this book could not have been researched and written without the love, forbearance, collaboration, and support of my wife, Deborah, or the inspiration of my sons, David and Andrew.
Also by Michael Hiltzik
"[A] detailed and vividly written study -- destined to be the standard history for decades to come." – Washington Post
Colossus
* * *
“Mr. Hiltzik presents the New Deal as an adventure made all the more thrilling by the uncertainty of its outcome—‘a work in progress from its beginning to end’—and one that sustained democracy by keeping America from social and economic collapse.” —The Wall Street Journal
The New Deal
* * *
ORDER YOUR COPIES TODAY!
© PHOTOGRAPH AMY MYERS
MICHAEL HILTZIK is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author who has covered business, technology, and public policy for the Los Angeles Times for twenty years. He currently serves as the Times’s business columnist. His previous books include Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of Hoover Dam and The New Deal: A Modern History. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Hiltzik’s other awards include the 2004 Gerald Loeb Award for outstanding business commentary and the Silver Gavel from the American Bar Association for outstanding legal reporting. He is a graduate of Colgate University and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and lives with his family in Southern California.
Visit the author at LATimes.com/Hiltzik
Follow @HiltzikM
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Michael-Hiltzik
Also by Michael Hiltzik
* * *
A Death in Kenya
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
The Plot Against Social Security: How the Bush Plan Is Endangering Our Financial Future
Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of Hoover Dam
The New Deal: A Modern History
We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
Bibliography
* * *
Alvarez, Luis W. Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Appleby, Charles A. Eisenhower and Arms Control, 1953–1961, vol. 1: A Balance of Risks. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1983.
Barrett, Edward L., Jr. The Tenney Committee. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951.
Beisner, Robert L. Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Bernstein, Jeremy. Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2007.
Bird, Kai, and Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Brands, H. W. Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
Brown, Laurie Mark, Max Dresden, and Lillian Hoddeson, eds. Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Buderi, Robert. The Invention That Changed the World: How a
Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Bush, Vannevar. Pieces of the Action. New York: William Morrow, 1970.
Byrnes, James F. All in One Lifetime. New York: Harper & Bros., 1958.
Cantelon, Philip L., Richard G. Hewlett, and Robert C. Williams, eds. The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
Big Science Page 48