 Ernest
Orlando Lawrence was born on 8th August, 1901, at Canton, South Dakota
(United States). His parents, Carl Gustavus and Gunda (née Jacobson) Lawrence,
were the children of Norwegian immigrants, his father being a Superintendant of
Schools. His early education was at Canton High School, then St. Olaf College.
In 1919 he went to the University of South Dakota,
receiving his B.A. in Chemistry in 1922. The following year he received his M.A.
from the University of Minnesota. He spent a
year at Chicago University doing physics
and was awarded his Ph.D. from Yale University
in 1925. He continued at Yale for a further three years, the first two as a
National Research Fellow and the third as Assistant Professor of Physics. In
1928 he was appointed Associate Professor of Physics at the University
of California, Berkeley, and two years later he became Professor, being the
youngest professor at Berkeley. In 1936 he became Director of the University's
Radiation Laboratory as well, remaining in these posts until his death.
During World War II he made vital contributions to the development of the atomic
bomb, holding several official appointments in the project. After the war he
played a part in the attempt to obtain international agreement on the suspension
of atomic-bomb testing, being a member of the U.S. delegation at the 1958 Geneva
Conference on this subject.
Lawrence's research centred on nuclear physics. His early work was on ionization
phenomena and the measurement of ionization potentials of metal vapours. In 1929
he invented the cyclotron, a device for accelerating nuclear particles to very
high velocities without the use of high voltages. The swiftly moving particles
were used to bombard atoms of various elements, disintegrating the atoms to
form, in some cases, completely new elements. Hundreds of radioactive isotopes
of the known elements were also discovered. His brother, Dr. John Lawrence, who
became Director of the University's Medical Physics Laboratory, collaborated
with him in studying medical and biological applications of the cyclotron and
himself became a consultant to the Institute of Cancer Research at Columbia.
Larger and more powerful versions of the cyclotron were built by Lawrence. In
1941 the instrument was used to generate artificially the cosmic particles
called mesons, and later the studies were extended to antiparticles.
Lawrence was a most prolific writer: during 1924-1940 his name appeared on 56
papers (an average of 31/2 papers a year), showing his
exceptional breadth of interest. He was also the inventor of a method for
obtaining time intervals as small as three billionths of a second, to study the
discharge phenomena of an electric spark. In addition he devised a very precise
method for measuring the e/m ratio of the electron, one of the
fundamental constants of Nature. Most of his work was published in The
Physical Review and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Among his many awards may be mentioned the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin
Institute, the Comstock Prize of the National
Academy of Sciences, the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society, the Duddell
Medal of the Royal Physical Society, the Faraday Medal, and the Enrico Fermi
Award. He was decorated with the Medal for Merit and was an Officer of the
Legion of Honour. He held honorary doctorates of thirteen American and one
British University (Glasgow). He was a member or fellow of many American and
foreign learned societies.
Lawrence married Mary Kimberly Blumer, daughter of the Emeritus Dean at Yale
Medical School, in May 1932. They had six children. His recreations were
boating, tennis, ice-skating, and music. He died on 27th August, 1958, at Palo
Alto, California.
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