Word: cyclotron
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...cyclotron of Ernest Orlando Lawrence neatly finesses such troubles by making a comparatively small voltage act on a particle repeatedly until it attains a speed corresponding to extremely high voltage, thus dispensing with a discharge tube altogether. Most conspicuous feature of the apparatus is an 85-ton electro-magnet whose poles face each other vertically across an 8-in. gap. In the gap is placed a shallow cylindrical tank, pumped out to a high vacuum so that particles inside may move freely without interference from air molecules. Ions such as deuterons (nuclei of heavy hydrogen...
...Breaks." Lawrence conceived the basic idea of the cyclotron in 1929 when he read a paper by an obscure German on the behavior of ions in a magnetic field. Next year he and three co-workers -Niels Edlefsen, M. Stanley Livingston and David Sloan-built the first cyclotron with a tank six inches across and a small magnet. It worked, but Lawrence pined for a bigger magnet...
...atoms of gold, thus technically at least realizing the old dream of the alchemists. But the raw material for this transmutation was platinum, and the few gold atoms were not worth a fraction of the energy used in manufacturing them, although the electric current necessary to run the cyclotron for an hour costs only $1.50. "Anyway," as Lawrence remarks with a grin, "the information we are getting is worth more than gold...
...Berkeley researchers have also created a small trace of Radium E-not a temporarily radioactive substance but actual radium. The Lawrence cyclotron technique has in the past five years come to be recognized as the most efficient atom-smashing device in the world. Eleven cyclotrons are either in operation or being built in the U. S., one in Canada, eleven in Europe and the Orient. And many of these projects are directed or staffed by men who learned their cyclotron technique as research fellows under Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley...
Radiations & Flesh. To guard against injury from radiations in the vicinity of the cyclotron, Dr. Lawrence's crew carry small electroscopes in their pockets which they discharge into a meter at the end of the working day to see how much radiation they have been exposed to. Since neutrons cannot be controlled by magnetic fields and slide easily through almost all substances except those rich in hydrogen, Dr. Lawrence moved the control panel 60 ft. away from the apparatus and surrounded the machine with tanks of water six feet high, three feet thick (every water molecule contains two neutron...