Word: cyclotrons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Harvard's facilities for nuclear research date back quite a while. Before the Second World War, the University owned a small, constant frequency cyclotron ("the only kind available at that time," says William M. Preston, director of the current cyclotron laboratory). During wartime, however, this machine was appropriated by the government and taken out to Los Alamos for use in the experiments that led to the atomic bomb...
...have to have genius to be a scientist-just character. All you have to do is work hard and figure things out." So said Ernest Orlando Lawrence in what amounted to a self-portrait. Hard work and hard figuring led to his development of the atom-smashing cyclotron and the Nobel Prize of 1939. His hard work led to creation of the University of California Radiation Laboratory, the country's best source of nuclear research. Last week when Physicist Lawrence died unexpectedly in Palo Alto at 57, science and the nation lost a citizen with character to spare...
...interest in radio led him to a Ph.D. in physics at Yale (1925), and he began studying ionization, the electrification of atoms by loss or gain of electrons. At 27 he was made an associate professor at the University of California, in 1930 conceived the idea of the cyclotron, which has been called "as useful in research as the microscope...
...cyclotron mechanized U.S. university research. Lawrence founded the Radiation Laboratory (total current staff: 5,100) to house his cyclotrons, which grew enormous once he learned that requests for big research money are more successful than begging for pennies. To study radiation. Lawrence brought in his physician brother, Dr. John Lawrence, then with Yale School of Medicine, who soon proved the isotope-making cyclotron's worth in disease research. World War II gave the isotopes another use: the atom bomb, which the cyclotron helped make possible by producing purified uranium 235. This achievement by Lawrence...
...Russia, as we descended from the plane, was the quality of the metal ladder-flimsy, antique, short by half a step, and made of some queer light metal, ornately engraved. Dozens of times later, I saw similar ladders. The Russians can build a ten-billion electron-volt cyclotron, but a good simple flashlight seems beyond them. Priority goes to what counts; nobody cares if you break a leg hoisting yourself on an airplane, but to put an artificial moon in the sky is something else again...