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ERNEST LAWRENCE
(Director, Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, 1936-1958)
People > Administrators
Born August 8, 1901, in South Dakota, Lawrence attended state university before pursuing graduate studies. He chose to study physics on the advice of Merle Tuve-a childhood friend who was also destined to become a famous physicist. Lawrence enrolled in graduate school at the University of Minnesota in 1922 to study under W. F. G. Swann. As Swann was wooed first to the University of Chicago and then to Yale, Lawrence followed. He graduated with his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1925, where he soon took on a teaching post. In 1928 he headed west to become associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he built up the Radiation Laboratory with university funds and with financial help from private sources and where he would remain for most of his professional career. In 1939, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work with cyclotrons. He would also earn a reputation in the 1930s as a top scientist-administrator overseeing scores of Rad Lab staff and young physicist cyclotroneers, and securing funding for Laboratory research. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Lawrence had made Berkeley a major center for nuclear physics. 
Lawrence thought that it was merely a matter of time before the United States was drawn into the war, and he wanted the government to mobilize its scientific forces as rapidly as possible. Early in 1941, he began to consider using the electromagnetic method to separate the uranium-235 isotope to be used in a uranium bomb. He proposed using a mass spectrometer, converted from use in his 37-inch cyclotron to separate larger, purer samples of uranium-235 for study and, eventually, to use the process to derive the lighter isotope on a large scale. Lawrence dubbed his new device a "calutron" in honor of the University of California. Excited by the prospects, Lawrence launched a campaign to speed up uranium research. He met with Vannevar Bush, director of the National Defense Research Committee, warning that Germany was undoubtedly making progress and that the uranium committee overseeing government support of research was moving too slowly. Bush appointed him an advisor to the committee, a move that quickly resulted in funding for research on the electromagnetic method as well as plutonium work at Berkeley. Although some observers doubted the likelihood that this method could produce uranium-235 on a large enough scale, Lawrence and his team had such success separating uranium isotopes that Bush expressed the hope in March 1942 that electromagnetic separation might produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb by 1944. In November 1942, electromagnetic separation was one of the two methods-along with gaseous diffusion-chosen for the uranium enrichment process. Research on beam resolution and magnet size and placement led Lawrence and his group to propose an arrangement of huge electromagnetic coils connected by a busbar in an oval racetrack configuration, as seen from above. Forty-eight gaps in the racetrack between the coils would each contain two vacuum tanks. Actual separation of the uranium isotopes would occur in the vacuum tanks. Construction of the first racetracks at the Y-12 Electromagnetic Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, began in February 1943. Lawrence and his team were intimately involved throughout the design, construction, and operation of the Y-12 facility. Despite early optimism about the electromagnetic method, the first tracks were plagued with problems, and enrichment proceeded more slowly than expected. Ultimately, however, the technique proved to be the most fruitful method during the war for the production of weapons-grade uranium. 
Lawrence, as head of the Rad Lab, played important roles in other major aspects of the Manhattan Project. Research at the lab by the chemist Glenn T. Seaborg identified element 94, which he later named plutonium, and proved that plutonium-239 was 1.7 times more likely than uranium-235 to fission. This indicated the possibility of producing large amounts of the fissionable plutonium in a uranium pile using plentiful uranium-238, and then separating it chemically. By late 1941, Lawrence was suggesting that plutonium might provide the shortest route to a weapon. In addition, Lawrence was a friend and colleague of the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who came to Berkeley in 1929. Lawrence helped involve Oppenheimer, who became director of the Los Alamos laboratory, in initial discussions on the physics of the bomb. Lawrence was first and foremost a physicist, but it was as a leader and promoter where he was perhaps most influential. As the historians Richard Hewlett and Oscar Anderson note: Lawrence's progress [on electromagnetic separation up to February 1942] had indeed been spectacular, but even more impressive was his style. His daring, courage, and irrepressible optimism were contagious. He inspired his staff to sweat over tedious jobs with no thought of time, his superiors in the university to cut red tape, and his seniors in Washington to see heady visions of an early weapon. When Bush visited Berkeley in February, he found the atmosphere in the laboratory "stimulating" and "refreshing." After the war, Lawrence remained an important advocate of and participant in nuclear research and weapons development. He was among the first to understand that the extraordinary costs of research in the new, post-war field would require government support. As the director of the Rad Lab, he continued its cutting edge efforts in particle physics. He remained involved in weapons work, including the development of the hydrogen bomb, and he helped found a second weapons laboratory at Livermore, California. Both the Rad Lab and the new weapons laboratory would come to bear his name: the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Lawrence remained director of the Rad Lab until his untimely death on August 27, 1958.
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The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources. Major sources consulted include the following. Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946: Volume I, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1962), 12, 33-36, 43-44, 50, 56-60, 69-70, 91-96, Hewlett and Anderson quote on p. 60; Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield, 1947-1952: Volume II, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), 225-26, 581-84. See also the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Historical Perspective on the Lab's Legacy, a brief biography of Lawrence and his Nobel lecture at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1939/lawrence-bio.html, and the American Institute of Physics online exhibit, "Lawrence and the Cyclotron" at https://history.aip.org/exhibits/lawrence/index.htm. On Lawrence's early years at the Berkeley Rad Lab, see, J.L. Heilbron and Robert Seidel, Lawrence and his Laboratory: a History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). On Lawrence in the war years and his relationship with other central people of the Manhattan Project, see Gregg Herken's Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). The portrait of Lawrence, the photo of the group posing with the 60" cyclotron, and the image of Lawrence, Seaborg and Oppenheimer are all courtesy of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.