Early Days at the Lawrence Laboratory
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
| Title |
| |
| Title of Series | ||
| Number of Parts | 340 | |
| Author | ||
| License | CC Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0 International: You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/52563 (DOI) | |
| Publisher | ||
| Release Date | ||
| Language |
Content Metadata
| Subject Area | ||
| Genre | ||
| Abstract |
|
Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings113 / 340
3
5
15
16
18
22
23
27
32
33
34
35
47
54
58
67
69
70
72
73
78
79
83
84
85
86
87
90
92
95
100
102
103
104
105
106
114
115
116
118
119
120
122
126
128
129
130
131
133
137
142
143
145
147
148
149
153
155
156
159
162
163
165
168
169
174
176
178
181
182
189
194
198
201
202
203
206
209
213
214
217
218
219
220
225
227
228
237
240
241
244
245
250
254
257
260
261
266
273
278
284
285
287
291
293
297
302
308
310
317
318
319
321
325
327
328
333
00:00
NobeliumProcess (computing)Combustion chamberAlpha particleRadionuclideVakuumverpackungActivity (UML)PeriodateMedical historyÖlOctane ratingThermoformingCarbon (fiber)Connective tissueSetzen <Verfahrenstechnik>Electronic cigaretteErdrutschArzneimitteldosisVulcanizationFunctional groupCurie temperatureChemical clockWaterfallRadioactive decayChemistSeparation processMarch (territory)ElectronegativityOrigin of replicationWine tasting descriptorsActive siteRiver sourceSurface finishingPharmaceutical drugBleiglanzCopperSample (material)FaserplatteUraniumPhysical chemistryNitrogen fixationLeakKernproteineController (control theory)WaxCollectingLightningTransformation <Genetik>Noble gasElektronentransferCandyMedicalizationWalkingArtificial leatherPhotosynthesisNanoparticleCobaltoxideSeparator (milk)Organische ChemieConglomerate (geology)FackelCalvin cycleTechnetiumAzo couplingPhase (waves)WaterProtonationChemical elementCancerElektrolyseHope, ArkansasCheeseSpring (hydrology)Stem cellCrystal twinningJoint (geology)Cell growthStructural steelHydrogenKlinisches ExperimentTritiumZunderbeständigkeitPhenobarbitalFalconryMolecular beamMan pageMolybdenumCiderDiamantähnlicher KohlenstoffBlock (periodic table)Shear strengthElectric arc furnaceDeath by burningHeliumDeterrence (legal)Recreational drug useWursthülleAgeingChemical reactionSea levelFaserverbundwerkstoffChemistryNobeliumAtomic nucleusTidal raceMachinabilityGene duplicationDipol <1,3->Ice frontSystemic therapyCoke (fuel)Chemical structureRadioactive tracerDiet foodPipetteResonance (chemistry)Storage tankDiethanolamineCross section (geometry)Left-wing politicsCoiled coilGraphiteinlagerungsverbindungenStuffingSchwermetallIslandMedical prescriptionCadaverAtomic numberBottling lineStickstoffatomNucleolusButcherValence (chemistry)Ballistic traumaBase (chemistry)Set (abstract data type)Binding energyElectronCupcakeLibrary (computing)NahtoderfahrungSense DistrictOperonHuman subject researchTube (container)LeadData conversionFireLambicOcean currentAmmoniumNitrateExplosionCalcium ammonium nitrateCell fusionFreezingResinAdenineFiningsTrauma (medicine)Consensus sequenceExciter (effect)Elektrolytische DissoziationBranntweinZeitverschiebungFormaldehydeEconomic sectorMagnetometerHydrophobic effectProlineLithiumRadical (chemistry)Tin canAtomic orbitalThin filmConcretionIsotopenmarkierungFood additiveStructural elucidationS-Adenosyl methionineGlassesAnomalie <Medizin>MagnetismNeotenyRedoxTiermodellMoleculeDeuteriumAageColourantKorkenAspirinYield (engineering)Beta sheetMolecularityEmission spectrumGolgi apparatusThermisches KrackenX-ray tubePotenz <Homöopathie>NeptuniumSolderPlutoniumTransuranium elementMass spectrometryCalvin, MelvinQuartzHydroxybuttersäure <gamma->Gene expressionStarvation responseDiffusionsnebelkammerActivated carbonDihydroergotamineAstatineMetabolic pathwayAluminiumStorm surgeAtomic orbitalRegulatorgenIon transporterMeeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:12
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to start with a little explanation. The talk that I am about to give you was originally prepared as part of a celebration
00:27
of the 45th anniversary of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory that was held last year. And it was intended to be a brief history in what one might call an anecdotal form.
00:46
That is, it touches somewhat on the light side of things. It deals a little bit with the scientific history of the laboratory, but largely it deals with the people and the things that happened.
01:02
So with that small explanation, I will begin the talk as I gave it. This will be a multimedia presentation. I will start with a more or less connected discourse and finish with a slideshow.
01:22
When I speak of the early days, I include only the period up to the end of 1940. By then, many people in the United States had become deeply concerned over the war in Europe. Some had left the laboratory for war work, and soon the laboratory itself
01:42
became involved in war work. One major peacetime project was started in 1940, the 184-inch cyclotron, but it did not get back to its original purpose until after the war. The hill above the Big C, I should explain that in Berkeley, there is a hill behind the town.
02:04
There is a big letter C for California, put there by the students, and I'm referring to that. The hill above the Big C was chosen for the site, and by the end of 1940, the Magnet Foundation was completed and the bottom yoke was in place.
02:21
This started the first expansion of the laboratory off the campus, the stage and growth belonging to a later period, beyond what I'm covering here. The radiation laboratory was the personal creation of Ernest Lawrence. It was his idea. He got the financial support.
02:41
He pulled together the equipment and drew the people, and of course he supplied the key idea, the cyclotron. Many other people helped in essential ways. I could name President Sproul of the university, Leonard Fuller of the Federal Telegraph Company in the university, who arranged the gift of the large magnet for the 27 and 37-inch cyclotrons,
03:04
Frederic Cottrell and Howard Poyon of the Research Corporation, and Francis Garvin of the Chemical Foundation, who looked with favor on Ernest's request for grants, Raymond Burge, who became chairman of the physics department in 1932, Don Cooksey from Yale, Stan Livingston, and many others,
03:22
but it was Lawrence's laboratory. Those of us who were there in the early days remember that Ernest was always the boss. This should be rid of the capital T and the capital B. That was a very important distinction. He could be very rough on people if he felt they were not giving their utmost efforts,
03:43
but he made up for this by his generosity and in giving credit and in sharing ideas. I never met Rutherford, but I've been told that he had the same kind of character with an important difference. Rutherford favored the individual researcher working with simple apparatus.
04:03
Lawrence believed in efforts so large that teamwork was necessary. In the very beginning, there was a penalty for this, the drive for greater energy and beam current was so frantic that people hardly had time to think, and some important discoveries were missed and some mistakes were made,
04:25
but this phase soon passed. On the whole, I think Lawrence was right. The rapid development of the cyclotron was more important in nuclear science than the question of who made which discovery. The laboratory was started in 1931,
04:43
and when I came to Berkeley near the end of 1932, it was in full swing. There was not only the 27-inch cyclotron giving protons around 2 MeV, but also the Sloan X-ray 2 on which great hopes were placed for cancer treatment
05:02
and a couple of linear accelerators of the Vetera type, which were built and operated by Dave Sloan, Wes Coates, and Bernard Kinsey. The Sloan X-ray 2 was used clinically for many years, but the linear accelerator concept fell by the wayside, waiting to be revived by new ideas coming from wartime radar developments.
05:26
It was certainly a busy place day and night, especially when Ernest was there, which was most of the time. I started my research in LeConte Hall. That is the physics building of the University of California, Berkeley.
05:40
I started my research in LeConte Hall on a molecular beam problem, but dropped that when the result I was seeking was obtained elsewhere and entered the exciting world of the radiation laboratory in the spring of 1934. Stan Livingston, the cyclotron expert, and Tlesio Lucchi, a retired commander in the Italian Navy,
06:06
who was a beloved general helper and factotum, gave me sage counsel on how to comport myself, as my previous experience had been in working alone and I needed to learn the art of teamwork.
06:20
This was not obviously easy, since no one is routinely coordinating the various tasks needed to keep the cyclotron going, and there were the twin dangers of neglecting what one should do or getting in the way trying to do something that someone else should do. Robert Oppenheimer was the chief theoretical advisor for the laboratory,
06:43
and he suggested that I study the gamma rays produced by proton and deuteron bombardment of light elements. This turned out to be an important experiment, because I found a five and a half MEV gamma ray from fluorine bombarded with protons, with which I could check Bethe and Heitler's new theory of gamma ray absorption by pair
07:05
production. The chief line of research going on then was the study of nuclear reactions by observing the protons and alpha particles, which are emitted during bomb production. These were detected by a thin ionization chamber connected to a linear amplifier,
07:25
a device not suited for observing gamma rays. Geiger counters were considered unreliable. Stan Livingston tells in a paper presented in Texas in 1967 what happened on February 24, 1934,
07:43
when the laboratory learned of the Joliot-Curie discovery of artificial radioactivity. They were using a Geiger point counter, a device that now seems as exotic as the coherer, to count alpha particles. It was not the familiar cylindrical Geiger-Miller counter.
08:02
The cyclotron oscillator and the counter circuit were turned on and off by the two poles of a double pole knife switch for convenience and timing. Within half an hour, the switching arrangement was changed so that the counter could be turned on while the cyclotron was off. Counter voltage was raised so that it would count beta particles.
08:23
The internal target wheel was rotated to bring a carbon target into the beam, and the activity of 1913 was there, produced by a different reaction than that used by its discoverers. The failure to see this activity first was a blow to the laboratory,
08:41
and there was a natural reaction against all Geiger counters. So, the first thing I did when I entered the laboratory was to go to Pasadena to learn from Charlie Laurison himself how to make quartz fiber electroscopes. I had my first Laurison electroscope, which is mounted in a lead wall chamber for detecting gamma rays,
09:04
inside the laboratory for only a few days, when Malcolm Henderson came to me in the middle of May with the news of the discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity in Rome, and he wanted to use my electroscope to look at some of these activities.
09:23
It took only a short while to make a new chamber out of a tin can with a thin aluminum window, and the tin can version of the Laurison electroscope became a valuable instrument for observing beta rays. Jack Livingood made one like it, which he used in a monumental survey
09:42
with Seaborg and others of activities produced in many elements by deuteron bombardment, which resulted in a rate of discovery of radioisotopes that was comparable to that of Rome following Fermi's first neutron-induced activity. Some of those that they found became
10:01
very important in medical and other applications, like iodine-131, iron-59, cobalt-60, and technetium-99m. There was a great surge of activity in the field of artificial radioactivity. The names involved are too many to list completely. Stan Livingston and I found a
10:23
radioactive form of oxygen, and Lawrence found sodium-24, which created a sensation, because very strong samples could be made. Once Lawrence had the cyclotron crews working around the clock to make a whole curie for a demonstration, that was a tough job.
10:46
Jackson Laszlo found sodium-22, which was the longest-lived artificial activity known at the time, but was soon to be suppressed. Martin Kamen and Sam Rubin found carbon-14, probably the most important radioactive isotope of all, and so on. Also, new types of activities
11:07
were discovered. Van Voorhis found that copper-64 could decay by emitting either negative or positive electrons, which was the first known example of that kind of radioactive decay. And Luis Alvarez found the first case of decay by orbital electron capture,
11:26
which is now a well-known process. Among the new activities were some that had atomic numbers differing from that of any known element, and were therefore new elements. First of these was found by Emilio Segre and Carlo Perrier in 1937. They worked in Palermo
11:47
with a piece of molybdenum that had been on the leading edge of the deflector plate in cyclotron, where it got a lot of bombardment, and which Segre had taken back with him after a visit in the summer of 1936. In it they found element 43, which they named technetium,
12:07
after the Greek word for artificial, as it was the first artificially produced element. Next was element 85, called astatine, for the Greek word for unstable,
12:21
found by Segre, Dale Carson, and Ken McKenzie in 1940. A little later in that same year of 1940, Bill Abelson, who had been a graduate student with Lawrence, came back to Berkeley for a short visit and supplied the missing link in the chemical identification of an activity induced
12:42
in uranium by neutron bombardment, which had been puzzling me for some time. It was mentioned in introduction. This was, as I had expected, the first transuranium element. I named it neptunium after the planet Neptune, just as uranium had been named after the planet Uranus.
13:01
After Phil Abelson left, I continued the work, trying also the deuteron bombardment of uranium, which produced a different isotopes of neptunium than the neutron bombardment, and found alpha activity in the neptunium samples, which suggests the presence of the next transuranium element,
13:21
because after the beta particle, the next step wouldn't actually be an alpha particle, and that leads one to think that that was the next one. I did some chemical separations showing that the alpha activity did not belong to uranium or neptunium, but did not complete this
13:41
investigation, because I was persuaded by Ernest Lawrence to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a few weeks to help set up a new laboratory for developing microwave radar. It was not called radar then. That word was coined later, but we did
14:01
work on radar. As a cover, the new laboratory was called the radiation laboratory, so there were two rad labs. That was sometimes a source of confusion. I left Berkeley by train for Boston on November 11, 1940. On November 28, Glenn Seaborg wrote me that Art Wahl had been making
14:26
some strong neptunium samples and said, if you are too busy to carry on the work alone, we would be glad to collaborate with you. In my reply on December 8, I say, it looks as if I shall not be back in Berkeley for some time, and it would please me very much
14:43
if you could continue the work on 93 and 94. Now in parentheses, they sometimes stretched out to five years before I came back to stay. I never did believe Ernest's estimate of a few weeks. That's end of parentheses. On March 8, 1941, Glenn wrote to me describing the final chemical proof
15:08
that the alpha activity belonged to the next element up the periodic table plutonium. In this correspondence, we did not use the names for the new elements, which were not yet official, but referred to 93 and 94, and the March letter was marked
15:25
confidential. See, secrecy was already creeping into nuclear research, and after that, secrecy became absolute, and none of these things were published for a long time. Luis Alvarez came from Chicago in 1936 with a lot of clever ideas. He was the originator
15:44
of the method of getting what is effectively a beam of very slow neutrons by pulsing the cyclotron and gating the detector so that it is only sensitive at some chosen time after the pulse of neutrons has been emitted. With Ken Pitzer, he used this method in an
16:05
investigation of neutron scattering by the two kinds of molecular hydrogen, ortho and para hydrogen, and with Felix Bloch of Stanford, he made the first measurement of the magnetic mode of the neutron. One of the questions at that time was the relative stability of the
16:23
nuclei hydrogen-3, called tritium, and helium-3, both of which have been observed by Mark Oliphant at the Cavendish Laboratory as products of the bombardment of deuterons by deuterons. Alvarez and Bob Coronard first showed that helium-3 is a stable one
16:42
by detecting it in atmospheric helium using the cyclotron as a mass spectrometer. Then, knowing that hydrogen-3 must emit beta particles, they looked for activity in deuterium gas bombarded by deuterons and found the activity establishing tritium as a radioactive
17:05
isotope. Gilbert Lewis of the University of California's Berkeley chemistry department played a very important role in the laboratory's history. As soon as the discovery of deuterium was announced, he set up equipment to make heavy water by electrolysis and furnished a sample
17:26
of heavy water to the laboratory, and in March 1933, the first beam of deuterons was produced by the cyclotron. That was a very important step. From then on, a major part of the work
17:44
was the deuterons, which are much more prolific and produce nuclear reactions that are protons or alpha particles. When I say prolific, first the cross-sections are larger so that you get more abundant reactions. You also get a greater variety of reactions because the deuteron has
18:04
contains two nucleons and you get more variety also. Lewis, like many associated with the laboratory, was a colorful character. He liked to tell how he fed some of his first heavy water
18:21
to a fly, and it rolled over on his back and winked at him. The second anecdote I have here, I heard myself. One day at lunch at the Faculty Club, Lewis heard some professors in the Department of Education arguing about whether children should be taught to add a column of figures
18:43
from the top down or from the bottom up. Gilbert Lewis said, the way I do it is, first I add them down and then I add them up, then I take the average. I could go on and on. There were many visitors to the laboratory who stayed and worked there
19:05
for considerable periods of time, like Jim Cork from Michigan, Jerry Krueger from Illinois, Lorenzo Amo, a count from Italy, Harold Walk and Don Hurst from the Rutherford Laboratory, Wolfgang Gettner from Germany, Maurice Namias from France, Sten van Friesen from Sweden,
19:26
Ryukichi Sagani from Japan, and Basanti Nag from India. The working visitors were very important to the laboratory. They not only contributed to the research program, but they carried back the cyclotron art to their own institutions.
19:44
Lawrence actively promoted this diffusion of knowledge, and Don Cooksey wrote what we call cookbooks of cyclotron lore, which are mailed to innocent institutions, and many people from the Berkeley Laboratory went out to help design and build cyclotrons
20:03
elsewhere. Milton White went to Princeton, Henry Newsom to Chicago, Hugh Paxton to Joliot Laboratory in Paris, Jackson Laszlo to Copenhagen, and Reg Richardson and Bob Thornton to Michigan. So the ability, the knowledge of building cyclotrons was rapidly diffused, and I think this
20:26
diffusion of we might call technological knowledge was very important in the advancement of nuclear science in that time. We're talking about the 30s now. Many of the physicists took part in the
20:40
running and maintenance of the cyclotron. There were regular crews assigned to this task. I remember being on the Owl crew for a while, which did not bother me as I was then a single man with rather nocturnal habits, but it was hard on some of the others, I remember.
21:01
If anything went wrong, we had to pull the cyclotron apart and try to fix it. The greatest problems were vacuum leaks and the burnout of filaments in the ion source, which was inside the cyclotron tank and also in the de-mountable oscillator tubes that had been built by Dave Sloan. When the ion source filament went out,
21:21
the vacuum tank of the cyclotron had to be rolled out of the magnet cap. Then the wax joint between the lid and the tank broken and the lid removed, the filament replaced, and it all had to be put back together again, the joints sealed up and the air pumped out and so on. Physicists did more than just operate the machine.
21:44
For example, Art Snell and Ken McKenzie built oscillators. Bob Wilson made the first theoretical study of orbit stability, and I designed the control system for the sixth-gen cyclotron. I was even doubling as an electrical engineer for a while.
22:02
This was in 1938 in a new concrete building. Crocker Laboratory was under construction to house the new larger cyclotron. The laboratory was now starting to expand. Bill Brobeck came in 1937 as the first professional engineer hired by the laboratory.
22:21
That created a real revolution. No more wax joints that leaked, no more equipment that fell apart in the middle of an important experiment, or at least less than before. The string and sealing wax school of physics still has a nostalgic appeal to some old-timers like myself,
22:43
but it's not suited to large efforts where many people are depending on the reliability of apparatus. Win Salisbury and Bill Baker, both electronic geniuses, took over the designing and building of oscillators and other electronic equipment. Charlie Litton came for a while and
23:02
taught us many techniques in radio frequency engineering. He had a small company in Redwood City, which he later sold to some entrepreneurs from Texas who used as a nucleus for the giant conglomerate called Litton Industries. Charlie retired to Grass Valley where he spent the rest
23:21
of his life happily working in various inventions. Interest in biomedical applications started very early. Ernest's brother John is a physician and Ernest always had an attraction to the field of medicine. I've already spoken about the Sloan X-ray 2, which went into medical use in 1934.
23:43
Next year John came to Berkeley, John Lawrence that is, John came to Berkeley for the summer and made the first observations of the effects of neutron rays on a living organism, finding the effects greater than those of other forms of radiation and therefore very interesting.
24:03
And in 1936 he came to stay. Paul Ebersold became the chief physicist for the biomedical group, making the arrangements for radiation and measuring the dosage. The first cancer patient was treated in September 1938 with sufficiently encouraging results that the Crocker Laboratory was devoted
24:26
to medical research, although the physicists and chemists got to use it too. There were working visitors in the biomedical field also. Frank Exner from New York, Isadora Lampe from Utah, Raymond Zirkle from Pennsylvania, Al Marshak, Lowell Erf, John Larkin and many others.
24:47
Dr. Joseph Hamilton had a separate group studying the distribution of radioisotopes administered to animals and humans. To the smells of hot oil from the cyclotron were added those of animal colonies. As Laszczuk said in his cyclotron alphabet, M stands for mice whose smell makes us
25:08
moan. We went through the WPA period. It was during the Great Depression and the WPA was a scheme by which unemployed people are hired by the government and assigned
25:21
to governmental bodies or other institutions to perform useful work. I have a, that stood for Works Progress Administration, WPA, I have a 1934 letter from Lawrence to the university office handing this program requesting for a period of one month. One, one physicist with PhD and several
25:45
years subsequent research experience. Two, one carpenter. Three, one machinist with several years experience in general shop work. Some of those who came on this program were real characters.
26:00
I remember particularly Murray Rosenthal who was an amateur magician, a Swedish draftsman named Hallgren who was so profane that we tried to keep him away from Don Cooksey who objected to his language, and a man who had been with a telephone company was very distinguished looking. He liked to go around checking the strength of soldered joints
26:23
by pulling at the wires with a button hook. Some who were only temporarily down in the stayed on and became valuable members of the laboratory staff. Some idea of the financial scale at that time was given by the cost estimate made by Wally Reynolds in 1931
26:41
for the installation of the 80 ton magnet. This includes moving the magnet from San Francisco and setting it in place. Four transformers, a 50 kilowatt motor generator set, a 10 ton crane, concrete piers, labor, engineering, and contingencies all for five thousand three hundred dollars.
27:02
It is hard to convey the atmosphere of that time. The world was in a deep depression. There was a general strike in San Francisco in 1934. Some people on the campus took sides during this strike and friendships were broken over this. There was a lot of leftist agitation which later
27:22
had dire consequences for many scientists. There was not much money around. For seven months between the end of my fellowship and my appointment to the faculty as an instructor, I was a research associate without pay. But we all managed somehow and the laboratory kept going.
27:41
Lawrence was the driving force and the spirits inside the laboratory were kept high by the excitement of discovery. There was very little organization. Lawrence was the boss and that seemed to be enough. What a change has taken place since then. The eager youth has grown into an
28:01
adult with increased powers and problems that come with maturity. So that's the end of the more or less connected discourse and out comes the slideshow and we used half our time up more or less. So we'll go on with the slides. Could I have the first slide? This is Ernest Lawrence
28:22
taken on September 19, 1930, just after he had given the first scientific paper on the cyclotron at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences on the Berkeley campus. He was holding a glass, brass, and wax apparatus with which he and Niels Adlafson had obtained evidence of
28:44
ion resonances in a magnetic field, encouraging Ernest to go on with the development of the cyclotron idea. From his expression you can see that he has hopes for the future. See this was in now September 1930 and this was before the radiation laboratory was started,
29:02
but that little apparatus that Lawrence is holding gave the first evidence that the cyclotron might work and encourage the whole thing to go on. Now slide two. Here are Stan Livingston and Ernest Lawrence standing beside the big magnet in the shop of the Pelton-Waterville
29:24
Company in San Francisco. This magnet had been built by the Federal Telegraph Company of Palo Alto for use as part of a Pulsom Arc radio transmitter ordered by the Chinese government, but it was never delivered. And Leonard Fuller, who was the vice president of the
29:43
Federal Telegraph Company in Palo Alto, also at the same time chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Berkeley, he arranged for that magnet to be given to the university for the researchers of Lawrence. And as I said, there it is being converted into a cyclotron
30:06
magnet. The bottom pole was removed and new poles were built. The core poles of the magnet had to be changed before it could be used as a cyclotron magnet. That is being done here in late 1931. Stan Livingston made the first cyclotron that worked.
30:25
After that little model that we showed in the last picture, Livingston took over and built the next model, and he made one that really did work. He found a beam of 80,000 electron volt hydrogen molecular ions. We heard about hydrogen molecular ions earlier. They're the simplest
30:46
molecule, also the first thing accelerated in a cyclotron. He found those on January 2, 1931 in a four-inch cyclotron. Then he made an 11-inch cyclotron with which in 1932, Milt White
31:02
continued the confirmed the lithium disintegration results of Carcroft and Walton. This work was done in LeConte Hall, but the big magnet needed a larger place to house it. As you all know, Stan was one of the discoverers or inventors of strong focusing without which most of high-energy physics could not have been done. So those were the
31:25
Lawrence, invented the cyclotron, Livingston made one work, first one first one work, and they're really the creators of this whole business. Slide three. This shows the old radiation laboratory. It had been a civil engineering testing laboratory.
31:44
It was scheduled to be torn down, but Ernest persuaded President Sproul, the President Sproul of the university, not of the United States. Of course, in university town, as you all know, and you ever say in the United States, you say president, you both mean the president
32:01
of the university, not of the United States. Ernest persuaded President Sproul to let him have it for his experiments. This occurred on August 26, 1931, in President Sproul's office. At that time, Ernest had the promise of financial support and a formal offer of the magnet. So if
32:21
one wants to choose a day for a birthday, this could be it. Early in 1932, the name radiation laboratory was painted on the doors. And I don't think you can, you can't see that in that picture, but around the door, the outside doors, I said radiation laboratory way back then
32:42
in 1932. The magnet was installed in January 1932, and the 27-inch cyclotron first operated in June of that year, 32. Six years later, the magnet poles were enlarged and the 37-inch
33:00
cyclotron was installed. In the crew record for November 10, 1937, I found the following poem by Martin Kamen. And of course, Martin Kamen is a man who, with Sam Rubin, discovered carbon-14. And he also liked to write poetry of this type. The cyclotron is a noble beast. It runs the best
33:21
when you expect it least. Of all the pleasures known to man, the greatest is a good, tight can. The can, he meant the vacuum tank. That's what we called it. And you remember what I said about the misery of leaks because I, it was really a, it was misery. You spend the whole night, you know, trying to find a leak and then you finally get it fixed. Then the wax would suck in
33:43
and you have to start all over again. In this building, which you see here, there was a large room for the cyclotron and its controls. There was an open cart for transformers and switch gear. There's a machine shop and some office space.
34:01
Whenever there was trouble with the commutator or the generator that supplied the magnet current, I was called in to fix it. I was considered an expert at soldering with a torch in those days. On one time, I remember that France Curie, when he was starting the motor generator, threw in the switches in the wrong order and blew out the lights in all of Berkeley.
34:24
Uh, that building was a scene of frustration and elation, human as well as scientific drama. Many anecdotes have been told about happenings there, like the times that Ernest Lawrence fired Bill Baker and another occasionally fired Bob Wilson, only to recant and take them back again.
34:45
But on the whole, relations were remarkably harmonious considering the many different temperaments of the people. After the war, the first tests of the synchro cyclotron principle were done here in this building, and in it Melvin Calvin did his primary work on the carbon
35:02
cycle and photosynthesis. Now we have slide four. That's another view of that same building taken in 1959. It's being demolished. Demolition is proceeding toward you in the last view, in the direction which would have been toward you in the last view, that not much is left of
35:24
the building. I am standing there, that's me, uh, sadly viewing the end of an era. Later, Crocker Laboratory had to go too. The chemistry department needed space for more buildings. So that was the, that was indeed the end of an era because it was in that old building that the
35:42
the whole business of nuclear physics with cyclotrons with accelerators, uh, circular accelerators got started. Slide five. This is the 27-inch cyclotron in 1932. Vacuum chamber, you see in the middle, sits between the poles of the magnet, and it's all
36:02
covered with wax. Everything was waxed together in those days. The stovepipe going up in front, pipe, uh, has a wire strung down the middle, which connects or carries the collective beam current to a galvanometer on the control table, which is out of the picture on the left.
36:23
And sticking out toward you in the front of the vacuum chamber is the linear amplifier built by Malcolm Henderson, which was used to count protons and alpha particles. The magnet windings were cooled by oil in those big circular tanks. They were full of oil that was circulated by a pump, and there was always oil all over everything.
36:48
At one time, Luis Alvarez neglected to close the valve after turning off the oil circulating pump, and a whole tank of oil ran over and went through the cracks in the floor into the basement. I remember that was a very dramatic incident by a Nobel Prize winner.
37:05
Slide six. This shows Ernest at the other side of the cyclotron, also in 1932. That photo has its own date. It's written on the, on that hydrogen tank in front.
37:21
You can't read it here, but in the original you can read it. Behind Ernest is the oscillator that supplied high-frequency power to the cyclotron. You can see that in this picture it uses a commercial vacuum tube, but these were expensive, and so for quite a while we used homemade tubes designed by Dave Sloan, in which were demountable. They had a wax joint
37:48
so that you could take them apart and change filaments. Ernest is recognized as one of the world's great experimental physicists, but he was not particularly adept with his hands, and contributed his share in the breakage of apparatus, as did all of us. When some delicate
38:06
task was to be done, he would turn to someone else and say, here, you do this. It was his ideas and enthusiasm that were the important things. Now, next slide, seven. This is Dave Sloan with his X-ray tube, which was essentially a Tesla coil in a vacuum tank,
38:26
and was actually, this X-ray tube was actually the first apparatus installed in that building. You see, as I told you, the big magnet didn't go in until 32, but this, this went in in 31. Dave was very important to the laboratory. He could build anything and was full of ingenious ideas.
38:45
He built large oil diffusion pumps when such items were not obtained, attainable commercially, and made demountable oscillator tubes in which the filaments could be changed by taking apart a wax joint. One time he tried to make a diffusion pump using bismuth vapor. This did not work very well, but it was an interesting idea. He was still
39:04
active at Physics International, working with high current accelerators, a natural continuation of what he did here. Next slide. Here is another side of the laboratory, the machine shop in the old radiation laboratory. Without shops, the laboratory could not operate. We used our own
39:24
shop, also the shop in LeConte Hall, a physics department shop, and large jobs were sent out to commercial shops. In this view, on the left is George Krauss, and on the right is Eric Layman,
39:41
working on a cyclotron tank, or at least looking as if they were contemplating working on it. Sitting in front are Don Cooksey, who was very important, as a general helper in the laboratory and organizer. Sitting in front are Don Cooksey, who made the shops one of his primary concerns, and Jack Livingood, the great hunter of radioisotopes, that's Livingood in the corner.
40:04
Three men who worked in that shop in the early days, Don Stallings, Jack Cole, and Paul Wells, are still with the laboratory. Now next is slide nine. This shows Art Snell, France Currie, and Bernard Kinsey, who were, I think, in the Strawberry Canyon pool when this picture was
40:23
taken. I was almost tempted to say they're at the Bod Schocken pool, but the background is not exactly right for that. The time is not right for that either. Art Snell came from Montreal in 1934, later went to Chicago, and is now at Oak Ridge. He was famous as the poet laureate of the laboratory. He would make limericks for all
40:46
occasions. When Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1939, he said, sent a wire that said, congratulations, your career is beginning to show some promise. He also built an oscillator, and he discovered radioactive argon, among other things.
41:07
France Currie, the man, no, France Currie from Yale, seems to be given a Tarzan yell, but he was actually a very gentle person. He introduced the cloud chamber technique into the laboratory. He made measurements of the energy distribution of beta rays,
41:23
and invented a method of presenting the data, the data for beta ray distributions, that made it easy to determine the upper limit of the energy. This is now known as the Currie plot, and has been widely used. In an investigation of the disintegration of nitrogen by neutrons,
41:42
he found some unusual tracks which could be interpreted as being due to the capture of slow neutrons and emission of protons, resulting in the formation of carbon-14. This observation of Currie served as a clue in finding the best method of making carbon-14,
42:02
which, as you might guess from what I've said, is a capture of slow neutrons by nitrogen. For quite a long time, I had a bottle of ammonium nitrate sitting near the cyclotron target, hoping eventually to separate out carbon and see if it was active. This bottle got knocked
42:20
over and broken, and I never put one back. People considered it to be a nuisance, and some were even afraid that it might explode. There had been some large explosions involving ammonium nitrate, but I don't think a small laboratory bottle was that dangerous. When carbon-14 was eventually identified and carbon bombarded by deuterons,
42:46
came in and rubened, then tried neutrons on nitrogen, and they never went back to the carbon bombardments, in which the yields were smaller and the active carbon was diluted by all the ordinary carbon. France Currie later was the director of the U.S. Navy Radio and Sound
43:02
Laboratory in San Diego. And the third man, Bernard Kinsey, was a Commonwealth fellow from England. He built a linear accelerator for lithium ions. There are many stories about Bernard. He had a high temper and a very complicated and colorful form of swearing, really a high R. He was here at this celebration, and perhaps he might be persuaded to
43:23
give us, not this celebration, but the one where I gave this first. He was here at this celebration, and perhaps he might be persuaded to give us an example. There was another Commonwealth fellow at the university named Brown, who was probably the laziest man I ever knew. I don't think he ever did anything. I saw him around the faculty club where I was
43:43
living at the time. He obviously was not in the laboratory. Ernest would have thrown him out. Now we come to slide 10. This is the Crocker Laboratory that I mentioned earlier. Old radiation laboratories off to the right across an alley, and the 60-inch cyclotron
44:02
resided in the high bay at the rear of that building. This was called the medical cyclotron, but as I have said, others used it. He went into operation in 1939, giving deuterons of about 9 million electron volts. Under the supervision of Dr. Joseph Hamilton,
44:24
it was used extensively for making radioisotopes for medical and tracer uses. And now the next slide. Here is the 60-inch cyclotron done Cooksey and Ken Green. You see that it's much neater looking than the earlier cyclotron. Bill Brobac, who was our
44:45
first engineer, had had his influence. The structure projecting at the right is a pair of tanks that held the D-stems which formed a resonant system. The oscillators were on the balcony at the right. You'll notice the coil of heavy cable at the top. That coiled up stuff up there. This
45:06
carried high voltage to the deflector plate from the rectifier built by Ed Lofgren. The reason for the coil is that high voltage cables usually fail at the ends and are very hard to splice, so the coil gave plenty of slack for making repairs. Next slide.
45:23
This is looking through the window into the control room of the 60-inch cyclotron. You see Bill Brobac, our engineer on the left, and Bob Wilson smoking his pipe. Wilson, of course, now is the director of the Fermi Laboratory of Batavia, Illinois.
45:43
And then there's Ernest Lawrence and a couple of other characters. It says here, one of them is me and the one behind, I don't remember who that was. Bob Wilson follows, well, that's no point of this. This temporary setup, the Mars and neatness
46:01
of the control table, was a breadboard model of an automatic magnet current regulator that was being tested. Next slide. This shows a group of people. There's a man on the left, I don't know who that is. Then comes Ernest Lawrence holding the manuscript, Dale Carson, a physicist
46:23
who is now president of Cornell University, Winfield Salisbury, our electronic genius, and Louie Alvarez, who is one of the laureates. Carson participated in the discovery of astatine and is now the president of Cornell University. Salisbury has had a distinguished career in the industry and the academic world since
46:43
leaving the laboratory. He made very valuable contributions to radar countermeasures during the war. Louie, as you know, went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics and so on. Next slide. This shows John Lawrence, the brother of Ernest Lawrence, taken in 1936 with rows of mouse cages
47:07
in the background, which is a proper setting for a biomedical researcher. I will not say any more about the biological and medical research which will be covered by another speaker on the program this was on. Slide 15. Again, there are mouse cages, this time with
47:27
mice in them, but the date is later, 1939, and the person is different, Dr. Joseph Hamilton. Dr. Hamilton had a setup in Crocker Laboratory where he worked with radioisotopes in medical
47:42
and biological studies. His work was quite pioneer work during the paths of the heavy elements in animals and in man. Joe's lunch table at the faculty club was noted for the
48:00
interesting conversations on many subjects. I remember that he had a special table, it was and I used to sit there and we discussed everything. Next. All was not hard work. We had fun too. There was an Italian restaurant called DiBiase's in a small town near Berkeley
48:26
and the DiBiase parties were famous yearly affairs in the laboratory and that was when we would let off steam and have fun. Here is Paul Ebersold, who's the man who was the physicist
48:43
who worked with the biologists and the medical people in the setting up, measuring of dosages and setting up of patients and so on, is the one holding the cake there. Paul Ebersold had an irrepressible sense of humor and was also the master of ceremonies. The party in 1939
49:03
was in celebration of the 60-inch cyclotron and Paul was presenting a cake in the shape of a cyclotron with the words 8 billion volts or bust. That was supposed to be a wild exaggeration but the bevatron had not been invented yet. You remember just a few years later that we had
49:22
6 billion volts which is almost this number given then as just an impossible exaggeration. Lawrence is on the left foreground and the man in the middle foreground, Sten van Friesen, one of our visitors from Sweden. Next slide. Also at the same party,
49:45
man on the left is Martin Kamen looking puzzled about something. Then there is Sten van Friesen, Bob Kornog, who worked with Alvarez in the discovery of hydrogen-3.
50:04
Then there's Ken McKenzie, who is in the left background. This slide is a little dark for this. On the right there, Mrs. Lawrence, Ernest's wife, flanked by two distinguished visitors,
50:21
Vannevar Bush on our left and Alfred Loomis on our right. Alfred was a great friend of Ernest in the laboratory and helped in many ways. Next slide. That's Lorenzo Amo Capodolista, who was the Count from Italy that I mentioned, who was one of the colorful characters of the
50:42
early days. He came to the laboratory in 1935 and stayed several years. He did not use the last name Capodolista, which means head of the list, and which is apparently a name of very great antiquity in Italy. He was a very fine fellow. Slide 19 is Charlie Lytton, the man who
51:05
came and helped us in many technological aspects and whose name was used in connection with industries. He's working with a glass lathe, which he made himself. The main thing, his original product was glass lathes like that. Next slide. This is Maurice Namias from
51:27
Jolien Curie's laboratory in France, posing with a vacuum chamber for the 37-inch cyclotron in 1937. Next slide. That's Henry Newsom, who came from Chicago in 1934 with a Ph.D. in chemistry.
51:46
I think he fits in very well with this group here. He came as a Ph.D. in chemistry, but became a physicist. He did some very ingenious experiments using recoil of artificially produced radioactive nuclei. This picture was taken in 1938. Next slide. This is Ernest and Molly
52:07
Lawrence with their first two children, Eric and Margaret. They ended up having sex, but this was the beginning. I'll take another step to the Crocker lab in 1939. Next slide.
52:21
This is Ernest Lawrence writing the script for a movie about his Nobel prize, which is in 1939. He's simply using the fender of a car as a desk there and writing the script. Now let's go on to next slide. That is Lee DeForest, the man who put the grid in the
52:42
vacuum tube to visit the laboratory. We have many distinguished visitors in the laboratory, and I included two shots. There's DeForest. Now you can show the next slide, which is Diego Rivera with Lawrence. Diego Rivera, of course, was the
53:01
Mexican mural painter, and he came to San Francisco and painted a mural on the wall of one of the buildings there. I remember going over and watching him working on it. And we're coming to the end. Next slide. Well, that'll do. That should be 90 degrees around,
53:23
but it'll do. That's one of the original 1934 Lawrence and electroscopes that I built when I first came to the laboratory in 1934 and used for that early work. And by some strange miracle, two of those things survived. They still exist. They still even work, and I put in a picture of one of them. Next slide. That's Glenn Seaborg on the occasion of
53:47
receiving his PhD in 1937. That gets in ahead of this cutoff date of 1940 for this thing. The next slide is me. That's taken at a press conference held in Crocker Laboratory on June 8,
54:05
1940, the time of the announcement of the discovery of neptunium, the first transuranium element. And they took a picture of me really, really making like a chemist there. Next slide.
54:21
So I found this slide in the archives, and I couldn't resist putting it in to end the slideshow. I call it On the Beach. Somewhere on the Sacramento Delta, John Lawrence, Paul Ebersold, and I are enjoying the sun with some girls. Now, if we look at that a while, maybe the sun will shine here. At this point, I will end.