Ernest O. Lawrence and the Cyclotron
Patents · Resources
with Additional Information
· Lawrence
Honored
· Cyclotrons
Photo Courtesy the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory
‘Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
is the namesake and legacy of its founder, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, winner
of the 1939 Nobel Prize
for Physics for his invention of the cyclotron, … the granddaddy
of today's most powerful accelerators. … [Lawrence] was the "father
of big science," the
first to advance the idea of doing research with multidisciplinary teams of
scientists and engineers. …
[The University of California at] Berkeley … was most anxious to develop
its small physics department. … Lawrence accepted an associate professor
position at Berkeley in 1928, just a few days following his 27th birthday.
Within three years, he was made the youngest full professor on the Berkeley
faculty [and] invented the cyclotron … . The cyclotron would be patented
in Lawrence's name, but he never asked for any royalties, and he encouraged
and helped other laboratories throughout the world to build cyclotrons. Lawrence
was also the legal inventor of the Calutron isotope
separator - but he assigned the patent rights to the U.S. government for a
fee of one dollar.
[In] 1952 … Lawrence lobbied for and won approval to establish a second
national weapons laboratory at Livermore.'1
‘Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
celebrated the Lawrence's centennial birthday with a special issue of LLNL's
Newsline newsletter that covered Lawrence's myriad accomplishments as well
as his approach to "big science," recollections from his son Robert,
and articles by former LLNL directors Edward Teller, Herbert York, and John
Foster.2
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Additional information about Ernest Lawrence and his research is available
in full-text and on the Web.
Documents:
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Additional Web Pages:
A Few Important
Events in Lawrence's Life, Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (LBNL)
Nobel Laureates, Ernest O. Lawrence
Landmarks: The First Million-Volt Accelerator, APS
Lawrence and the Cyclotron, American
Institute of Physics
(AIP)
"'Atom
Smasher' Taught Science World to Think Big," Newsline,
August 3, 2001. E.
O. Lawrence Remembered, LBNL
Conversation
with Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence and Dr. Alfred Loomis, American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Ernest Orlando Lawrence, National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
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