Ernest O. Lawrence
Ernest O. Lawrence
Born	(1901-08-08)August 8, 1901 Canton, South Dakota
Died	August 27, 1958(1958-08-27) (aged 57) Palo Alto, California
Residence	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley Yale University
Alma mater	University of South Dakota University of Minnesota Yale University
Doctoral advisor	W.F.G. Swann
Doctoral students	Edwin McMillan Chien-Shiung Wu
Known for	The invention of the cyclotron atom-smasher elementary particle physics The Manhattan Project
Notable awards	Hughes Medal (1937) Elliott Cresson Medal (1937) Comstock Prize in Physics (1938) Nobel Prize in Physics (1939) Faraday Medal (1952) Enrico Fermi Award (1957)

Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American physicist and Nobel Laureate, known for his invention, utilization, and improvement of the cyclotron atom-smasher beginning in 1929, based on his studies of the works of Rolf Widerøe, and his later work in uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project. Lawrence had a long career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a Professor of Physics. In 1939, Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in inventing the cyclotron and developing its applications. Chemical element number 103 is named "lawrencium" in Lawrence's honor. He was also the first recipient of the Sylvanus Thayer Award.^[1] His brother John H. Lawrence was known for pioneering in the field of nuclear medicine.

Early life[link]

Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born in Canton, South Dakota. His parents, Carl Gustavus and Gunda (née Jacobson) Lawrence, were both the offspring of Norwegian immigrants who had met while teaching at the high school in Canton, South Dakota, where his father was also the superintendent of schools. Growing up, his best friend was Merle Tuve, who would also go on to become a highly accomplished nuclear physicist.

Lawrence attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota, but he transferred to the University of South Dakota after his first year. Lawrence completed his bachelor's degree in 1922. He earned his master's degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1923. Next, Lawrence spent a year at the University of Chicago, and then he moved on to Yale University, where he completed his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1925, making him somewhat unusual in his field—a very promising young physical scientist who had received his entire education in the United States. These were years when study at one of the great science institutions of Europe was considered to be essential for anyone who truly wished to make a significant scientific progress. Lawrence remained at Yale University as a researcher, working in the photoelectric effect, and he became an assistant professor there in 1927.

In 1928, Lawrence was hired as an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of California, and two years later he became a full Professor, becoming the youngest Professor at the University of California. There, he was called the "Atom Smasher", and the man who "held the key" to atomic energy. "He wanted to do 'big physics,' the kind of work that could only be done on a large scale with a lot of people involved," said Herbert York, the first director of the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, as quoted on that Laboratory's official Web site.

Robert Gordon Sproul 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. They were influential men who helped him obtain money for his energetic nuclear particle investigations.^[2]

The Developments of the Cyclotron[link]

The invention that brought Lawrence to international fame started out as a sketch on a scrap of paper. While sitting in the library one evening, Lawrence glanced over a journal article by Rolf Widerøe^[3] and was intrigued by one of the diagrams.^[4] The idea was to produce very high-energy particles required for atomic disintegration by means of a succession of very small "pushes." The device as depicted however, was laid out in a straight line using increasingly longer electrodes.

Diagram of cyclotron operation from Lawrence's 1934 patent.

Lawrence saw that such an accelerator would soon become too long and unwieldy for his university laboratory. In pondering a way to make the accelerator more compact, Lawrence decided to set a circular accelerating chamber between the poles of an electromagnet. The magnetic field would hold the charged protons in a spiral path as they were accelerated between just two semicircular electrodes connected to an alternating potential. After a hundred turns or so, the protons would impact the target as a beam of high-energy particles. Lawrence excitedly told his colleagues that he had discovered a method for obtaining particles of very high energy without the use of any high voltage.

Other scientists, including Leo Szilard, had investigated similar concepts, but Lawrence is credited with developing it further and turning it into practice.^[5]

The first model of Lawrence's cyclotron was made out of brass, wire, and sealing wax and was only four inches in diameter—it could literally be held in one hand. It probably cost $25 in all. And it worked: When Lawrence applied 2,000 volts of electricity to his makeshift cyclotron on January 2, 1931, he got 80,000-electron volt protons spinning around (at about 1% the speed of light). Through his increasingly larger machines, Lawrence was able to provide the crucial equipment needed for experiments in high energy physics. Around this device, Lawrence built up his Radiation Laboratory, which would become the world's foremost laboratory for the new field of nuclear physics research in the 1930s. He received a patent for the cyclotron in 1934,^[6] which he assigned to the Research Corporation. In 1936 the Radiation Laboratory became an official department of the University of California with Lawrence formally appointed its Director. He served in that capacity until his death. In 1937, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[7]

In November 1939, Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the cyclotron, the first particle accelerator to achieve high energies. He was the first of only two accelerator physicists who have won the Nobel Prize, the other one being Simon van der Meer. Not only was he the first at Berkeley to become a Nobel Laureate, he was also the first ever to be so honored while at a state-supported university. The award ceremony was held on February 29, 1940 in Berkeley, California due to the war, in the auditorium of Wheeler Hall on the campus of the university with Lawrence receiving his medal from Carl E. Wallerstedt, Sweden's Consul General in San Francisco.

World War II and the Manhattan Project[link]

Giant calutron plants developed at Lawrence's laboratory were used at Site X during World War II to purify uranium for use in the first atomic bomb.

During World War II, Lawrence eagerly helped to ramp up the American investigation of the possibility of a weapon utilizing nuclear fission. His Radiation Laboratory (known as the Rad Lab), became one of the major centers for wartime nuclear research, and it was Lawrence who first introduced J. Robert Oppenheimer into what would soon become the Manhattan Project. An early champion of the electromagnetic separation method to enrich uranium and increase its percentage of fissile U-235, Lawrence manufactured his magnetic calutrons — specialized forms of mass spectrometers — for the massive isotope separation plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Lawrence's secretary, Helen Griggs married the future Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner, Glenn T. Seaborg, in 1942, as the three of them made their way to work on the Manhattan Project in Chicago, Illinois.

Post-war career and legacy[link]

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

For his service to his country, Lawrence received the Enrico Fermi Award from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1957, and was the first recipient of the prestigious Sylvanus Thayer Award by the United States Military Academy in 1958.

In July 1958, President Eisenhower requested that Lawrence travel to Geneva, Switzerland, to help negotiate a proposed treaty with the Soviet Union to ban nuclear weapons testing. Despite suffering from a serious flare-up of his chronic colitis, Lawrence decided to go, but he became ill while in Geneva, and was rushed to the hospital at Stanford University. Lawrence died one month later in Palo Alto, California, at the age of 57.

Just 23 days after his death, the Regents of the University of California voted to rename two of the university's nuclear research sites after Lawrence: the Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories. The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award was established in his memory in 1959. Chemical element number 103, discovered at LBNL in 1961, is named "lawrencium" in his honor. In 1968 the Lawrence Hall of Science public science education center was established in honor of Ernest O. Lawrence, who had been throughout his career a passionate advocate of encouraging public interest in science, particularly among schoolchildren. The museum features a permanent exhibit devoted to Lawrence's life.

References[link]

1. ^ Information Office United States Military Academy West Point, New York (March 4, 1958). "Dr Ernest Orlando Lawrence". http://www.aogusma.org/aog/awards/TA/Thayer58.htm. Retrieved 2008-03-07. 
2. ^ Brechin, Gray A. (1999). Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520215680.  edit (p. 312)
3. ^ Widerøe, R. (17 December 1928). "Ueber Ein Neues Prinzip Zur Herstellung Hoher Spannungen" (in German). Archiv fuer Elektronik und Uebertragungstechnik 21 (4): 387. 
4. ^ "Breaking Through: A Century of Physics at Berkeley. 2. The Cyclotron.". Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 2012-02-25. Archived from the original on 2012-02-25. http://www.webcitation.org/65it02HeS. 
5. ^ On Szilard and the cyclotron, see

   Rhodes, Richard (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0671441337.  edit

6. ^ US patent 1948384, Ernest O. Lawrence, "Method and apparatus for the acceleration of ions", issued 1934-02-20 
7. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter L". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterL.pdf. Retrieved 13 April 2011. 

Other sources[link]

• Childs, Herbert (1968). An American Genius: The Life of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Father of the Cyclotron. E. P. Dutton. ISBN 978-0525054436.  edit
• Herken, Gregg (2003). Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. Holt Paperbacks. ISBN 9780805065893.  edit
• Heilbron, J. L.; Robert W. Seidel (1989). Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520064263. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5s200764/.  edit

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ernest O. Lawrence

• Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
• Ernest O. Lawrence Annotated Bibliography for Ernest Lawrence from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• American Institute of Physics (AIP)
  • Lawrence and the Cyclotron: AIP History Center Web Exhibit
  • Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (photos.aip.org: Ernest Lawrence Images)
• Guide to the Ernest O. Lawrence Papers at The Bancroft Library
• Lawrence Berkeley Lab:
  • Ernest Orlando Lawrence -- The Man, His Lab, His Legacy
  • Lawrence and His Laboratory: A Historian's View of the Lawrence Years by Heilbron, Seidel, Wheaton.
• Lawrence Livermore Lab: Remembering E. O. Lawrence (biography)
• NobelPrize.org: Ernest O. Lawrence biography
• Nobel-Winners.com: Ernest Lawrence

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Ernest Thayer
Born	(1863-08-14)August 14, 1863 Lawrence, Massachusetts
Died	August 21, 1940(1940-08-21) (aged 77) Santa Barbara, California
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	American
Spouse(s)	Rosalind Buel Hammett

Ernest Lawrence Thayer (August 14, 1863 – August 21, 1940) was an American writer and poet who wrote "Casey at the Bat".

Biography[link]

Thayer was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts and raised in Worcester. He graduated magna cum laude in philosophy from Harvard in 1885, where he was editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Its business manager, William Randolph Hearst, hired Thayer as humor columnist for the San Francisco Examiner 1886–88.

Thayer’s last piece, dated June 24, 1888, was a ballad entitled "Casey" ("Casey at the Bat").

It took several months after its publication for the poem to make Thayer famous, since he was hardly the boastful type and had signed the June 24 poem with the nickname "Phin". Two mysteries remain about the poem: whether anyone or anyplace was the real-life Casey and Mudville, and, if so, their actual identities. On March 31, 2007, Katie Zezima of The New York Times penned an article called "In 'Casey' Rhubarb, 2 Cities Cry 'Foul!'" on the competing claims of two towns to such renown: Stockton, California, and Holliston, Massachusetts.^[1]

On the possible model for Casey, Thayer dismissed the notion that any single living baseball player was an influence. However, late 1880s Boston star Mike "King" Kelly is odds-on the most likely model for Casey's baseball situations. Besides being a native of a town close to Boston, Thayer, as a San Francisco Examiner baseball reporter in the offseason of 1887–88, covered exhibition games featuring Kelly. In November 1887, some of his reportage about a Kelly at-bat has the same ring as Casey's famous at-bat in the poem. A 2004 book by Howard W. Rosenberg, Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly: U.S. Team Sport's First Media Sensation and Baseball's Original Casey at the Bat, reprints a 1905 Thayer letter to a Baltimore scribe who was asking about the poem's roots. In the letter, Thayer singled out Kelly (d. 1894), as having shown "impudence" in claiming to have written it. Rosenberg argues that if Thayer still felt offended, Thayer may have steered later comments away from connecting Kelly to it. Kelly had also performed in vaudeville, and recited the poem dozens of times, possibly, to Thayer's dismay, butchering it. Incidentally, the first public performance of the poem was on August 14, 1888, by actor De Wolf Hopper, on Thayer's 25th birthday.

Thayer's recitation of it at a Harvard class reunion in 1895 may seem trivial except that it helps solve the mystery, which lingered into the 20th century, of who had written it. In the mid-1890s, Thayer contributed several other comic poems for Hearst's New York Journal and then turned to overseeing his family's mills in Worcester full-time.

Thayer moved to Santa Barbara in 1912, where he married Rosalind Buel Hammett and retired. He died in 1940, at age 77.

The New York Times' obituary of Thayer on August 22, 1940, p. 19 quotes comedian DeWolf Hopper, who helped make the poem famous:

"Thayer indubitably wrote 'Casey,' but he could not recite it.... I have heard many other give 'Casey.' Fond mamas have brought their sons to me to hear their childish voices lisp the poem, but Thayer's was the worst of all. In a sweet, dulcet Harvard whisper he implored 'Casey' to murder the umpire, and gave this cry of mass animal rage all the emphasis of a caterpillar wearing rubbers crawling on a velvet carpet. He was rotten."

References[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Ernest Thayer

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ernest Thayer

External links[link]

Biography portal

• Ernest Lawrence Thayer at Find a Grave

Lawrence Bridges (born December 31, 1948) is an American filmmaker, poet, television producer, and entrepreneur.

Personal life[link]

Bridges was born in Burbank, California, the son of Edith Bridges, the daughter of homesteading Friesian (Dutch) immigrants, and Robert Bridges, a mechanical engineer. Bridges has one child and is a graduate of Stanford University and Dartmouth Business School (Tuck).^[1]

Career[link]

Bridges got his start in the early 1980s as an editor of music videos, most notably Michael Jackson's "Beat It."^[2] He founded the post-production company Red Car Inc. [1] in 1982 and has since grown the company to seven locations worldwide with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, and Buenos Aires.

Bridges graduated from Stanford University with an English degree and began his film career as a production assistant on Francis Ford Coppola's film "The Conversation."

In a 1987 Rolling Stone interview Stanley Kubrick, in reference to a series of Michelob commercials that Bridges had edited, remarked that these were "some of the most spectacular examples of film art" and "the editing was some of the most brilliant work I've ever seen."^[3][4]

Red Car[link]