Ernest O. Lawrence was the architect of team research in basic science on a grand scale. By merging fundamental research and practical engineering, he escalated the pace of both scientific exploration and technological development. Pushing the frontiers of knowledge, integrating science into national policy, and coordinating science with the general welfare, Lawrence helped shape the Laboratory in its formative years, and his precepts characterize the Laboratory today.
Lawrence was born in Canton, South Dakota, on August 8, 1901, and received his B.S. degree from the University of South Dakota and his M.A. in physics from the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. from Yale, and in 1928, became an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Two years later, he became the youngest full professor on the faculty.
The invention that would rocket E. O. Lawrence to international fame started out modestly as a sketch on a scrap of paper. While sitting in the library one evening, Lawrence happened to glance over a journal article and was intrigued by one of the diagrams. The idea was to produce very high-energy particles required for atomic disintegration by means of a succession of very small “pushes.” He quickly formulated the principles of the cyclotron and linear accelerator, and thus set a course that was to fundamentally influence scientific research and human events. The first model of Lawrence’s cyclotron was made out of wire and sealing wax and probably cost $25 in all. And it worked—when Lawrence applied 2,000 volts of electricity to his make-shift cyclotron, he got 80,000-volt projectiles spinning around. He had discovered a way to “smash” atoms, and in doing so he unwittingly paved the way for the U.S. nuclear weapons program that was to follow a decade later. In November 1939, Lawrence won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the cyclotron and its various applications, including production of isotopes and cancer treatment.
The detonation of the first Russian atomic bomb in 1949 alarmed Lawrence and other American scientists, who were concerned that the Soviets might advance quickly to the next step, the hydrogen bomb. Lawrence, who had been a key participant in the World War II atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, met in October of 1949 with Edward Teller, a brilliant physicist at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, to discuss this threat. Teller advocated a second nuclear weapons laboratory to provide competition, to diversify expertise, and to handle the large volume of work that future fast-breaking discoveries would bring. In late 1951, Thomas Murray, an Atomic Energy Commission member, contacted Lawrence, then director of the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory, to discuss this issue of a second laboratory. Along with Teller and Herbert York, one of Lawrence’s postdoc students, Lawrence won approval for Project Whitney, the early designation of the Livermore Lab.
Interestingly, Teller and Lawrence didn’t see eye to eye on the scope of the new laboratory. Teller envisioned a large, fully staffed facility that would rival Los Alamos in size. Lawrence, more experienced in the ways of bureaucracy, realized that an incremental approach was more likely to win funding and the approval of those who remained skeptical about the need for another laboratory. In the end, Lawrence’s prudence prevailed. Lawrence choose a former naval air station in the Livermore Valley of California for a second laboratory, and on September 2, 1952 the University of California Radiation Laboratory—Livermore Site began doing research in support of the nuclear weapons program at Los Alamos. Herb York was director, and the Lab’s steering committee included Edward Teller, Harold Brown, John S. Foster, Jr., Arthur T. Biehl, and others.
Just after his death in 1958, the University of California Board of Regents voted to rename the Berkeley and Livermore laboratories after E. O. Lawrence.
