At the time Lawrence was sketching his massive cyclotron, one that would make the Brits’ Birmingham model look like a “toy,” he was going directly against the accepted opinion of experienced cyclotroneers. At Cornell, Hans Bethe, along with his student Morris E. Rose, had concluded that the thirty-seven-inch machine was optimum, and their calculations showed that relativity limited the maximum energies obtainable in a cyclotron. Anything bigger was a waste of time and money. In some quarters, it was even hinted that the brash Swede was too eager for fame and was overreaching. But Lawrence’s great strength was that he never bowed to accepted theory. As he once told a colleague, “It never does much good to find out why you can’t; put your effort into what you can do.” Lawrence persevered and coolly answered Bethe’s criticism: “We have learned from repeated experience that there are many ways of skinning a cat.”
Loomis had much in common with Lawrence in this respect, as he too had little time for the superiority of theoretical physicists over the experimentalists. “It was only, ‘Aren’t you trying to get too much money? Aren’t you trying to make too big a step?’ ” said Loomis. “And that was easily answered by the people who knew about it. The real question was whether you could get the vacuum tubes [big enough] in those days, to step it up. Ernest’s answer was, ‘Do it anyhow, whether we can get them or not, because we just have to buy 100 of these tubes and put them together in a bank.”
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Already allied with Mussolini’s Italy, Germany had that August signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, clearing the way for her march through Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany and Italy. The news shocked everyone at the laboratory, particularly Lawrence, who was inclined to block the troubled world from his mind in order to focus on his work. There was great concern all around, because Lawrence’s brother was still in England, where he had gone to give a talk on the Rad Lab’s work on radiation treatment to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and was due to sail home on the Athenia.
That evening, the radio carried a report that a German submarine had torpedoed the Athenia, and it was sinking off Scotland. Sick with worry, Lawrence sat glued with his ear to the radio for six hours until the news came that all of the Americans on board had been rescued by a British destroyer. But they could not be sure the reports were accurate, and their doubts were made worse by conflicting reports that some five hundred passengers and crew had been lost. Two more tense days followed, then Lawrence finally received word from an Oakland Tribune reporter that John was safe. Lawrence immediately made some calls to Washington and cabled his brother in Glasgow that he had secured him a berth on the first American ship sailing from Britain. For the Berkeley physicist, there was no longer any escaping the reality of the war in Europe.
Lawrence wrote expressing his gratitude to the British physicist John Cockcroft, his friendly rival at Cavendish Laboratory, who had looked after his brother in London, and had forwarded a recent letter from him along with his own kind note. Despite the widening war, Lawrence still shared the widespread view that Europe would resolve its problems without involving the United States and that he should continue devoting himself to purely scientific pursuits and experimentation:
We have all been through a harrowing experience. I could not bring myself to believe that hostilities actually would break out, and the attack on Poland came to me as a great shock, as doubtless it likewise did to millions of people elsewhere. It is all a very sad business, and the best we can hope for now is that it will not go on for many years. As you doubtless know, the feeling over here is practically unanimously on the side of the allies, and there is complete confidence that they will win in the long run. Let us hope that it will not really take a long time. . . .
LOOMIS arrived in San Francisco in early November 1939 and spent most of the winter on the West Coast, dividing his time between Lawrence’s cyclotron and his work for Compton on radar. He and Ellen stayed at the Mark Hopkins, and after she returned east, Loomis moved into the Claremont Hotel in Oakland. He organized a small laboratory on Berkeley’s campus to carry out a microwave experiment that Lawrence helped him design and even brought out some men from Tuxedo Park to work there.
The main purpose was to bring himself up to speed on the microwave radar system based on the klystron tube, which had been invented by an instructor at the Stanford Physics Department named William Hansen, with help from a former roommate, Russell Varian, and his brother Sigurd, who was a commercial pilot. Hansen was also a mathematical genius who had entered Stanford at fourteen, where his groundbreaking work on microwaves soon brought him attention. In the summer of 1937, the Varian brothers had worked with Hansen on the design of a microwave device for navigating and detecting planes. To get the wavelengths in the range they wanted, and to shrink radar equipment from its present unwieldy size, they had to overcome the frequency limit of commercial oscillator tubes. In a stroke of brilliance, Hanson had tried setting up oscillations in a cavity, and it worked. His cavity resonator, or “rhumba-tron,” as he called it, became the basis for their first crude detection device, made of cardboard coated with copper foil, operating in the thirteen-centimeter range.
The Sperry Gyroscope Company sensed he was on to something and offered to sponsor a research program in aircraft detection, which led to Russell Varian’s refinement of the idea and the design of the klystron tube, named for the Greek verb klyzein, the breaking of waves on the shore. They went on to develop a detection system using a ten-centimeter klystron, though with very little wave power, and a range of possibly three to four miles. They did early experiments with an antenna reflector consisting of a sixteen-foot parabolic cylinder mounted on a Sperry sixty-inch searchlight frame, which provided a very narrow, sharper beam. The device detected moving objects by the Doppler frequency of the moving object. As the Sperry klystron program expanded, it was divided into two projects: a small group, working under Hansen out of the Stanford Physics Department, was carrying out experiments on the airplane detecting device, while a much larger team, which had assembled at the spacious plant Sperry had built in nearby San Carlos, was trying to design a satisfactory blind landing system based on the klystron. Both groups were also doing research to try to improve the tubes. True to form, Loomis was Sperry’s first customer. He had shown up at their door, checkbook in hand, just as he had years before to purchase one of the first Shortt clocks.
When he was not working on radar, Loomis spent every spare minute in the Rad Lab boning up on cyclotron engineering. After listening to all Lawrence’s plans for an enormous 100–200-million-volt cyclotron, he declared himself convinced and threw his considerable support behind the giant machine. He also proved helpful in a variety of ways, in one instance using his industry contacts to help Donald Cooksey, assistant director of the Rad Lab and Lawrence’s right-hand man, get copper and steel for a cyclotron under construction in Calcutta. Even more appreciated were the large dinners he regularly hosted at Trader Vic’s and Di Biasi’s attended by Lawrence and his wife, Molly, Cooksey, Alvarez, and the rest of “the gang” at the Rad Lab.
“Mr. Loomis would come out here to Berkeley for several months at a time and work right in the lab with Lawrence,” recalled a senior Rad Lab colleague. “He knew his physics and was capable of working. You’d never think he was something special, except that he always arrived in a big seven-passenger limousine. His chauffeur just sat in the car the whole day, waiting for him.” Nobody knew how much money he gave Lawrence directly for his cyclotron project. Lawrence once confided that Loomis was “one of the ten richest men in the country, yet nobody knew this.” Everyone at the lab was aware Loomis had established a fund marked “Ernest O. Lawrence, Personal,” as the checks were signed. “He made Lawrence his protégé and played angel to him all through the years. He gave Lawrence advice about investments, and I imagine Lawrence made quite a bit out of them.”
Loomis kept a desk in the building
where Lawrence worked, and the thirty-seven-inch machine was running right downstairs. The assault on the unknown territory of the nucleus had begun, and he could not stay away. “I just got caught up in it then,” he recalled. “It was all the excitement. The soldiers had been getting across the bridge into a new field.” Alvarez, who was one of Lawrence’s protégés at the lab, was not surprised to see the “millionaire physicist” on the premises, as he had heard much about his activities from Berkeley colleagues who had been to Tower House. A tall, ruddy blond—he favored his mother’s family, which was Irish, rather than his father’s Spanish heritage—Alvarez was assigned to show Loomis around. But after taking some time to introduce their esteemed guest “to more nuclear physics than he had known before,” Alvarez was more than a little taken aback by Loomis’ response:
I [had] mentioned in passing that because of the war in Europe the price of copper had risen to almost twice that of aluminum, volume for volume. Since aluminum has only 60 percent more specific resistivity than copper, I suggested that aluminum might now be the preferred metal for the magnet windings of the 184-inch cyclotron. It seemed obvious to me from elementary scaling laws that an aluminum coil would be larger but would cost less. I had completely forgotten about the suggestion when, a few days later, Alfred showed me a long set of calculations based on several altered designs of the 184-inch cyclotron that proved my snap judgment wrong. I appreciated then for the first time the difference between the world of business, where a 20 percent decrease in cost is a major triumph, and the world of science, where nothing seems worth doing unless it promises an improvement by a factor of at least ten. I hadn’t done the calculations, because they obviously didn’t permit such large savings. Alfred, on the other hand, considered it worth a day or two of his time to see if he could cut the cost of the magnet windings by $50,000.
By then, Loomis was convinced that Lawrence’s project was of compelling importance to science, and he made it his mission to raise the money so that he could build the largest cyclotron ever made. Much in the same way Wood had once opened doors for him, Loomis arranged for the young Berkeley physicist to meet with many of the influential players in science, business, and philanthropy on the East Coast, personally squiring the wide-eyed country boy to a series of private meetings in Cambridge, New York, and Washington. Their rounds included Compton at MIT; Vannevar Bush, who had resigned as vice president of the university to become head of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, a private research organization founded by the steel baron; F. W. Walcott, the former senator and fellow Carnegie trustee, whose son had leukemia; and Frank Jewett, the head of Bell Labs. Compton in particular did a great deal to help carry the ball, bringing Lawrence and his proposal to the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation. After a morning session with Compton at his MIT office, Lawrence wrote Loomis to thank him for his help and update him on the prospective donors he was scurrying to line up:
I had expected that both you and Compton would warmly approve the cyclotron project and would do everything possible to assist in bringing it about, but I did not expect there would be such widespread cordial approval, and it was a very pleasant experience to find wholehearted support in every quarter.
Dr. Jewett telephoned a friend in Denver regarding Mr. Spencer Penrose; and, although we learned that Mr. Penrose was very ill with a cancer of the esophagus and could not be approached, it was arranged for me to go to Denver and consult his physician, who is also a close personal friend and adviser. This I did. Dr. McCressin received me very cordially, and after listening to our plans, said that he was sure that it was the kind of project that would interest Mr. Penrose very much and, should Mr. Penrose improve sufficiently in the near future, he would be more than glad to put the matter to him favorably. . . . On the other hand, he said that in the event that Mr. Penrose does not get better his estate will go into the Penrose Foundation, which has in its charter the stipulation that the funds must be expended in the state of Colorado, thus ruling out any possibility of participating in this project.
The outlook for support in other quarters, however, is very promising, and, at the suggestion of Dr. Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation, we are going ahead immediately with the preparation of detailed plans. I am hoping that somewhere and somehow funds will be forthcoming early in the year so that we will be able to begin actual construction next spring. . . .
On November 9, it was announced that Lawrence had won the Nobel Prize for physics for his invention and development of the cyclotron. It came as something of a surprise, as for months there had been rumors out of Stockholm that there would be no Nobels awarded in chemistry and physics because of the war. Loomis was ecstatic. He immediately appreciated the weight that the award would carry in convincing those who still doubted the feasibility of Lawrence’s monumental undertaking. The accompanying prestige and fanfare promised to make the job of fund-raising that much easier. Lawrence had ruled out making the trip to Sweden to attend the prize ceremony because of the danger of German submarines, particularly after his brother’s close call, so when Loomis saw him a few days later, they celebrated his success with a drink.
As both Loomis and Lawrence were always impatient for results, it was their habit to conduct almost all of their business by telephone; therefore the correspondence between them tends to be hurried and spotty. But the latter part of 1939 and beginning of 1940 was a crucial juncture in the cyclotron project, and they had much to plot and plan, sending a flurry of letters back and forth between Berkeley and Tuxedo Park, where Loomis had returned in December for the holidays. Four days before Christmas, Loomis dashed off a triumphant note, addressing it to “my dear Dr. Lawrence”:
Dr. Weaver spent a whole day with me, and we had a most interesting talk. He said he was looking forward to seeing you early in January. I was very encouraged with the conversation. I also spent quite a lot of time with Dr. Bush and others on the matter of the new machine, and I feel very encouraged. Karl Compton is coming down to spend a week with me in South Carolina in the middle of January, and I think his opinion will be of the utmost importance. . . .
Lawrence sent a quick reply to say he was “mighty glad” to get the good news and that plans for the cyclotron were going splendidly. Weaver had urged him to be bold and to beware of presenting the Rockefeller Foundation with a project “on too small a scale.” Lawrence had taken him at his word and enlarged his vision yet again. “We have worked out enough of the details of machine weighing in the neighborhood of 5,000 tons to permit rather complete drawings to be made,” he wrote Loomis enthusiastically. He promised to send along a copy of the artist’s sketch of the proposed cyclotron in a day or two, adding, “It certainly is a thrilling thing to behold. We are perfectly sure this outfit will produce 200 million volt alpha particles, and there is a reasonable chance that we will be able to push on up to 300 million volts. I can hardly wait for the day when these plans will be realized.”
Lawrence, who was by now the recipient of a generous stipend from Loomis, was also writing to request additional funds for two former graduate students he wanted on his team at Berkeley. In a calculated appeal to Loomis’ competitive spirit, he noted that he had just had a letter from MIT’s Robley Evans saying that their cyclotron was ready to go except for some trouble tuning up the oscillators, and that his former graduate student, Stanley Livingston, had reported that Harvard’s cyclotron was running very well. Lawrence prompted, “To save further delays, it might be advantageous for Livingston simply to duplicate the Harvard radio-frequency layout. Incidentally, Evans wrote me that he hoped to come out here to work a while in the laboratory next summer if he can raise the money for his travelling expenses, and it seems to me a fine idea if travelling expenses would be provided for both Livingston and Evans.”
He also inquired whether Loomis would “care to step in and help out” in another situation: Dr. S. Mrozowski, a member of the faculty of the University of Warsaw, had spent a sabbatical year at Berkeley before retur
ning to Poland to take charge of the cyclotron project there and had fled Warsaw only a few days before the war broke out. Lawrence explained that he had “landed in this country with only a few hundred dollars” and had written to him of his plight. He suggested that $1,000 would make all the difference. “[He] is a good man and is proving a help in the laboratory, particularly now as we are short-handed; so it is entirely justified, quite apart from humanitarian aspects, to pay him to be with us . . . if it is entirely agreeable with you to provide a stipend (of possibly $150 a month for six months) for Mrozowski, it would certainly be appreciated.” He concluded by sending his regards to Compton and company. “I wish it were possible for me to drop in on you some evening and sit and talk with you all, probably around a cheery fire in your Carolina island.”
On January 5, Loomis sent a hastily scribbled note on Honey Horn plantation stationery explaining that he had asked his treasurer to issue a check for $1,000 from the Loomis Scientific Institute to take care of Mrozowski and assured Lawrence that he would speak to Compton so that Evans could “go out next summer.”
When Weaver arrived in Berkeley on January 7, 1940, he was flabbergasted to discover that Lawrence’s plans now called for a magnet weighing between four thousand and five thousand tons, in a housing 120 feet in diameter, and instead of the previous estimate of $750,000, he now wanted as much as $2 million. Lawrence was either blind to Weaver’s dismay or overly confident of his persuasive powers. He may also have chosen to gloss over any nagging doubts he may have had, though it was not Lawrence’s nature to dwell on the negative. In a long, ebullient letter to Loomis on January 13, Lawrence reported that Weaver’s visit was “a great success all around. From the moment of his arrival it was clear that he was very keen for the project; and, as his visit here progressed, he became more enthusiastic. . . .” Weaver had also disclosed the confidential information that Compton had been nominated as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, to go into effect in April. “It goes without saying that he will be a tower of strength on the board for the project.”
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