Ernest Lawrence

His parents, Carl Gustavus (1871–1954) and Gunda Regina (née Jacobson) Lawrence (1874–1959), were both the offspring of Norwegian immigrants who had met while teaching at the high school in Canton, where his father was also the superintendent of schools.

He had a younger brother, John H. Lawrence, who would become a physician, and was a pioneer in the field of nuclear medicine.

Growing up, his best friend was Merle Tuve, who would also go on to become a highly accomplished physicist.

Lawrence attended the public schools of Canton and Pierre, then enrolled at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, but transferred after a year to the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.

Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American nuclear physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron.

He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, as well as for founding the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born in Canton, South Dakota, on August 8, 1901.

He completed his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1922, and his Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1923 under the supervision of William Francis Gray Swann.

For his master's thesis, Lawrence built an experimental apparatus that rotated an ellipsoid through a magnetic field.

A graduate of the University of South Dakota and University of Minnesota, Lawrence obtained a PhD in physics at Yale in 1925.

Lawrence followed Swann to the University of Chicago, and then to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where Lawrence completed his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in physics in 1925 as a National Research Fellow, writing his doctoral thesis on the photoelectric effect in potassium vapor.

He was elected a member of Sigma Xi, and, on Swann's recommendation, received a National Research Council fellowship.

Instead of using it to travel to Europe, as was customary at the time, he remained at Yale University with Swann as a researcher.

With Jesse Beams from the University of Virginia, Lawrence continued to research the photoelectric effect.

They showed that photoelectrons appeared within 2 x 10−9 seconds of the photons striking the photoelectric surface—close to the limit of measurement at the time.

Reducing the emission time by switching the light source on and off rapidly made the spectrum of energy emitted broader, in conformance with Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

In 1926 and 1927, Lawrence received offers of assistant professorships from the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California at a salary of $3,500 per annum.

Yale promptly matched the offer of the assistant professorship, but at a salary of $3,000.

Lawrence chose to stay at the more prestigious Yale, but because he had never been an instructor, the appointment was resented by some of his fellow faculty, and in the eyes of many it still did not compensate for his South Dakota immigrant background.

In 1928, he was hired as an associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, becoming the youngest full professor there two years later.

In its library one evening, Lawrence was intrigued by a diagram of an accelerator that produced high-energy particles.

He contemplated how it could be made compact, and came up with an idea for a circular accelerating chamber between the poles of an electromagnet.

The result was the first cyclotron.

Lawrence went on to build a series of ever larger and more expensive cyclotrons.

Lawrence was hired as an associate professor of physics at the University of California in 1928.

He became a full professor two years later, becoming the university's youngest professor.

Robert Gordon Sproul, who became university president the day after Lawrence became a professor, was a member of the Bohemian Club, and he sponsored Lawrence's membership in 1932.

Through this club, Lawrence met William Henry Crocker, Edwin Pauley, and John Francis Neylan.

Based on Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie's 1934 published work on artificial radioactivity, Lawrence discovered the nitrogen-13 isotope by firing high-energy protons into a carbon-13 element in his laboratory.

He and his team including Martin Kamen and Samuel Ruben accidentally discovered the carbon-14 isotope by bombarding graphite with high-energy protons.

His Radiation Laboratory became an official department of the University of California in 1936, with Lawrence as its director.

In addition to the use of the cyclotron for physics, Lawrence also supported its use in research into medical uses of radioisotopes.

During World War II, Lawrence developed electromagnetic isotope separation at the Radiation Laboratory.

It used devices known as calutrons, a hybrid of the standard laboratory mass spectrometer and cyclotron.

A huge electromagnetic separation plant was built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which came to be called Y-12.

The process was inefficient, but it worked.

After the war, Lawrence campaigned extensively for government sponsorship of large scientific programs, and was a forceful advocate of "Big Science", with its requirements for big machines and big money.

Lawrence strongly backed Edward Teller's campaign for a second nuclear weapons laboratory, which Lawrence located in Livermore, California.

After his death, the Regents of the University of California renamed the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory after him.

Chemical element number 103 was named lawrencium in his honor after its discovery at Berkeley in 1961.