Word: cyclotrons
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...building in which he was working, traveled eastward across the U. S. and across the Atlantic to attend a European scientific conference in Brussels. He was the only U. S. scientist invited. He had invented and was already making formidable use of a curious and powerful atomic weapon-a "cyclotron" that imparted great speeds to projectiles for smashing atoms by whirling them around in a strong magnetic field...
Ernest Rutherford was one of the old pioneers in atomic physics and Ernest Orlando Lawrence is one of the new. Last week Lawrence was again traveling eastward, bound for Rochester, N. Y. where the National Academy of Sciences meets this week. Not only as the originator of the cyclotron but as the foremost U. S. destroyer and creator of atoms, the No. 1 U. S. investigator of artificial radioactivity and the headmaster of what is in effect a school for atomic physicists, he was to receive the Comstock Prize ($2,500 and a certificate). With a membership limited...
...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...