Lucky Dog
The Rockefeller Foundation had heard three substantive objections to the he-man cyclotron: that relativity would cripple it; that the muse of discovery did not attend cyclotroneers; and that the Foundation would further its program in the applications of physics to biology by favoring the production of natural, rather than artificial, isotopes of the elements of living things. All these objections lost much of their force while the Rockefeller trustees pondered. The second two both collapsed with the detection of H3 and C14 , two solid discoveries that promised to give biologists tracers for the most important ingredients in organic molecules. Lawrence made much of both these products of his Laboratory. He gave the discovery of H3 pride of place in his report to the Research Corporation for 1939. "Radioactive hydrogen," he wrote, in a gloss he doubtless expected Poillon to pass on to the Rockefeller trustees, "opens up a tremendously wide and fruitful field of investigation in all biology and chemistry."[54]
Toward the end of the dickering, in late February 1940, Kamen and Ruben called on Lawrence, then in bed with one of his colds, to present their first, flimsy evidence of the existence of C14 . "He jumped out of bed, heedless of his cold, danced around the room, and gleefully congratulated us." His ecstasy turned to outrage on learning that the report of the discovery in the Physical Review bore the names Ruben and Kamen. "He turned on me [Kamen recalled] with ill-concealed anger and demanded to know why my name and the institutional credits placed me and the Rad Lab in a position secondary to the Chemistry Department." The explanation, that Ruben thought he needed all the credit he could amass to gain tenure in a Chemistry Department not free from anti-Semitism, did not placate Lawrence, who thought the Laboratory needed all the credit it could garner to win the Rockefeller
[53] Fosdick, Review for 1940 , 36–41.
[54] Lawrence, "Report . . . for 1939," 1940 (15/18).
sweepstakes. "The best of all," Lawrence wrote Weaver, in an itemization of favorable signs, "is the discovery of carbon 14 by Kamen and Ruben [!] here. . . . All cyclotrons now in existence could be usefully employed in making radio-carbon only."[55]
The third objection—that Lawrence did not know what he was doing, that the maker of the cyclotron knew too little physics, that he had overstepped the limit set by Einstein and nature—was answered emphatically by the certifiers of the world's greatest physicists. On November 9, 1939, Lawrence received the telegram from Stockholm that responded to the recommendations of distinguished physicists throughout the world. The Swedish Academy of Sciences had decided to award him the Nobel prize in physics, "for your having invented and developed the cyclotron and especially for the results attained by means of this device in the production of artificial radioactive elements." He thus fulfilled almost to the volt the prophecy made by Jesse Beams eight years before: "With 10–8 amps at 900,000 volts you already have a powerful tool and Boy with 20,000,000 you'll get the Nobel prize."[56]
Lawrence was first proposed formally in 1938, by an American, a Japanese, and an Indian (who proposed a division with Fermi). The prize committee could not decide whether the cyclotron was prizeworthy and chose Fermi for his discovery of radioactive substances and the method of activation by slow neutrons.[57] In 1939 the Compton brothers organized a campaign for Lawrence among former American prizewinners (all prizewinners have a permanent right of nomination); two of them, Clinton Davisson and Irving Langmuir, did propose Lawrence; Carl Anderson preferred Stern; Millikan did not care to exercise his franchise. The usual rationale for the nomination was, as Langmuir put it, Lawrence's "construction of the cyclotron and his studies of radioactivity that have been made possible by its use." Another ground, which
[55] Kamen, Radiant science , 132, 134; Lawrence to Weaver, 2 Mar 1940 (15/30).
[56] Swedish Academy of Sciences to Lawrence, 9 Nov 1939, and Henning Pleijel to Lawrence, 16 Nov 1939 (37/20); Beams to Lawrence, 29 Jul 1931 (2/26).
[57] Nobelkommittén för fysik, report, 13 Sep 1938 (Nobel). The nominators: Henry A. Erikson (University of Minnesota), Hantaro Nagaoka, and C.V. Raman. C.D. Anderson named Lawrence as his second choice.
perhaps agrees better with the facts, was expressed by Livingston in a letter forwarded to the Nobel committee by Davisson. Livingston observed that many people before Lawrence had had the idea of the cyclotron. "However the idea developed," Livingston continued, "Lawrence was the first and only one to have enough confidence in it to try it out. . . . His optimistic and inspirational attitude was what convinced me it was worth working on." And thus their division of labor: "Professor Lawrence's ability as a director and organizer and his inspirational leadership amount almost to genius, but the bulk of the development was done by others."
The foregoing enumeration does not exhaust the list of Americans who proposed Lawrence for the physics prize for 1939. Two invited to nominate that year, E.F.W. Alexanderson of General Electric and the eminent surgeon Harvey Cushing, plumped for him; and Bethe and R.C. Gibbs of Cornell decided that if Lawrence did not win, they would use their invitation to nominate for 1940 on his behalf. In a few words, as DuBridge wrote Lawrence after the happy news, "there seems to have been an unanimous feeling for the past two years at least that you were the outstanding candidate among American physicists for the Nobel award."[58] And he had powerful support in places where he was not a favorite son. The Italians—Amaldi, Fermi, and Rasetti—endorsed him unanimously, after Fermi's victory in 1938; the most influential Scandinavian physicists, Bohr and Manne Siegbahn, favored him; and even the British, or anyway those who did not think that Cockcroft and Walton had the prior claim, "would have made the award in the way the [Nobel] Committee did."[59]
There was rejoicing in Berkeley (plate 10.2). Birge worked out that Lawrence was the thirteenth American to win a Nobel prize in science and the first to have won while employed at an American state university. The Physics Department and the administra-
[58] K.T. Compton to Lawrence, 4 Oct 1938 (37/20); A.H. Compton to Cooksey, 5 Jan 1939 (4/10); Langmuir to Nobelkommittén, 14 Nov 1938, and Livingston to Davisson, 3 Jan 1939 (Nobel).
[59] Gibbs to Lawrence, 13 Nov 1939 (37/21); DuBridge to Lawrence, 20 Nov 1939 (6/17). Rasetti to Lawrence, 16 Nov 1939 (37/24); Bohr to Nobelkommittén, 19 Jan 1939 (Nobel); Siegbahn to Lawrence, 9 Nov 1939 (37/20); E.V. Appleton to Lawrence, 30 Nov 1939 (27/21).
tion of the University, which had reduced Lawrence's teaching load and given him money, therefore deserved a share of the honor, Birge wrote Sproul. "I think if the outside world realized more fully the handicaps under which we work, in getting and retaining men of real eminence, it also would consider the whole collection of events leading up to this award as a seeming miracle." The regents proclaimed that the prize ranked Lawrence "with the greatest scientists of the world." Lawrence knew better and graciously associated his collaborators with the honor.[60] In turn they gave him a high-spirited party—a "jubilation"—at their favorite Italian restaurant. Aebersold provided an apt text, which the celebrants sang to the tune of "A Ramblin' Reck from Georgia Tech:"[61]
The prexy came around to see the gadget put to test
Of course the young professor wished to show it at its best
"You may fire the thing when ready, boy," the eager prexy cried
So Lawrence pushed the switches in and quickly stepped aside.
He aimed it at the window pane and smashed out all the glass
It hit a poor old alley cat right square upon his—face
He turned it on some students and it swept them off their feet
He bombed the Campanile and he moved it down the street.
And then he bombed some common lead and turned it into gold
The prexy jumped around with joy and loudly shouted, "Hold
I am convinced the thing is good—no more I'll have to go
To the Solons up in Sacrament' to ask them for some dough.
The publicity surrounding the prize—which made Lawrence the subject and victim of the advertisements he had courted—was its most important and useful feature.[62] As Weaver observed in his telegram of congratulations: "Some of us think they were a year or two late. But this definitive recognition is nonetheless particularly useful just now." What Weaver had in mind appears more clearly in Lawrence's letter of thanks to Siegbahn. "It was already clear
[60] Birge to Sproul, 24 Nov 1939 (2/32); Underhill to Lawrence, 17 Nov 1939 (37/20); Sproul in U.C., 1939 prize , 5; Lawrence in ibid., 33.
[61] Aebersold to Snell, 10 Nov 1939 (1/9); the party took place on Nov 17.
[62] Cooksey to Roger Hickman, 12 Jan 1940 (8/28); letters in (37/21–24). Cf. Zuckerman, Scientific elite , 221–36.
that the difficulties in the problem [of attaining 100 MeV] were no longer technical but purely financial. The added prestige to the work of our laboratory which the Nobel award brings . . . will make it possible for us to raise the large financial support for this great project."[63] The prize, like the successful operation of the 60-inch cyclotron, would undercut those who doubted the feasibility and/or desirability of a machine rated at five times the Bethe-Rose limit and encourage foundations willing to take risks endorsed by the Nobel authorities. Lawrence understood the power of the prize to confer legitimacy on new fields or doubtful adventures; in a report written in 1938, he had pointed out the useful advertisement provided by Nobel laureate Joliot's decision to build a cyclotron.[64] Several successful fund-raisers made the same observation as Weaver, among them Walter Alvarez, Cottrell, and Poillon.[65] And Lawrence spread the message widely in his answers to the several hundred letters and telegrams he received; to more than fifty of these correspondents he excused the honor, and opened his thoughts, by observing that the cyclotron would be the beneficiary of his placement among the demigods of science.
The size of the projected cyclotron grew along with its prospects in the nourishing light of the Nobel prize. The plan for a 2,000-ton machine with 120-inch pole pieces, considered, at a cost of $500,000, to be at the edge of the attainable in October 1939, swelled to a dream of a 5,000-ton atom smasher with poles of 205 inches. Answering Bohr's congratulations of November 14, Lawrence referred to a machine of 3,000 tons; answering G.W.C. Kaye's on December 30, he mentioned his Christmas wish of 5,000.[66] It is very likely that without the Nobel prize Lawrence would not have had the boldness to have doubled his design and his costs. The 184-inch machine owes its existence as much to the prize givers of Stockholm as to the exertions of Warren Weaver.
[63] Weaver to Lawrence, 10 Nov 1939 (37/24); Lawrence to Siegbahn, 4 Dec 1939 (37/20).
[64] Lawrence, "The work," 1937, 12, and Science, 90 (3 Nov 1939), 407–8.
[65] Letters from W. Alvarez, 20 Nov 1939, Cottrell, 11 Nov 1939 (37/21), and Poillon, 10 Nov 1939 (37/23).
[66] Letter to Bohr (37/21) and to Kaye (37/22); F.W. Loomis et al. to Lawrence, ? Nov 1939 (37/23), mention the profession's expectation of 120 inches.
The award to Lawrence honored not only the invention of an instrument but also the creation of the environment necessary to exploit it. What the Nobel committee had in mind appears best from the award letter quoted earlier: they were impressed by the invention and development of the machine and "especially" by its application to the production of radioisotopes. The same emphasis appears in the committee's report to the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which dwells on output figures: the cyclotron easily makes artificial sources of gamma rays equivalent to a hundred grams of radium and gives a hundred times the neutrons from a kilogram of radium mixed with beryllium. Reference to production does not occur, however, in the official citation ("for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it, especially with regard to artificial radioactive elements") or in Bohr's statement of Lawrence's achievement ("for the extraordinarily great contribution to the study of the reactions of atomic nuclei that he has made by construction of . . . the so-called cyclotron").[67] The official citation and Bohr's recommendation suggest that Lawrence himself made some notable contribution to radiochemistry or nuclear physics with the help of the cyclotron. Indeed he did: the cyclotron laboratory. But he himself had not uncovered much new about the nucleus. Had the Nobel committee wished to distinguish inventors of an accelerator who had made a fundamental discovery with it, they did not have far to look. Cockcroft and Walton fit the description and had the additional advantage over Lawrence of priority. And their work was considered prizeworthy. Otto Schumann of Munich nominated them for 1935; Rutherford and Fowler did so in 1937; Chadwick took up their cause in 1938 and 1939; and the Nobel committee agreed that both their "pioneering" splitting of the nucleus and their exact determination of atomic masses had "a special importance." In 1951 they did share the prize "for their pioneer work on the transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles."[68]
[67] Nobelkommittén för fysik, report, 12 Sep 1939, 12–4 (Nobel); Nobel Foundation, Directory , 56; Bohr to Nobelkommittén, 19 Jan 1939 (Nobel).
[68] Nobelkommittén, 25 Sep 1935, re Schumann's proposal, and 7 Sep 1937, 11–2 (Nobel); Crawford, Heilbron, and Ullrich, Nobel population , s.v. "Cockcroft," "Walton;" Nobel Foundation, Directory , 58. Cf. Lawrence to Cockcroft, 1 Dec 1939 (37/21): "I hope also to be sending you a congratulatory letter on the Nobel prize next year or later, as I feel very strongly that you well deserve it."
In preferring Lawrence to Cockcroft and Walton, the Nobel committee on physics went against its own arguments and precedents, although in a direction of which Nobel would have approved. Lawrence's was the first award for the development of an instrument for physics if we leave C.T.R. Wilson's prize of 1927 out of the reckoning. Efforts to give prizes for hardware alone had subsequently failed. In 1935 Walther Nernst proposed Hans Geiger. The Nobel committee thus evaluated his candidacy: "One can say that the Geiger counter together with the prizewinning Wilson chamber are the experimental instruments that have made possible the brilliant discoveries in nuclear physics. . . . But Geiger himself has not taken any noteworthy part in the work that led to these important discoveries."[69] A campaign of many years on behalf of Aimé Cotton, who built a very large electromagnet (100 tons, 75 cm pole tips, 64 kG) for the Paris Academy of Sciences and used it for important spectroscopic studies, likewise did not convince the committee. Pieter Zeeman (prize of 1902) might compare Cotton's magnet with Aston's mass spectrograph or the Rowland grating, and insist that progress in physics comes equally from ideas and from machines; C.E. Guillaume (prize of 1920) might declare Cotton's magnet precious and its research potential prizeworthy; Pierre Sève of Marseilles might demand a reward for "the construction of an instrument unique in the world . . . , the Laboratoire du Gros Electroaimant, where many workers under [Cotton's] direction have already obtained extremely important results in all branches of physics;" but the committee rejected it all, on the ground that Cotton had not made any discovery with his magnet important enough to deserve a Nobel prize.[70]
The relaxation of this condition in Lawrence's favor owed much to the progress and popularity of nuclear physics and to the scale of the machines and laboratories it required. One of Cotton's last nominators, C.E. Guye of Geneva, realized that, if the Nobel committee went for machines, they would probably prefer those of nuclear to those of atomic and molecular physics.
[69] Nobelkommittén, report for 1935, 6 (Nobel).
[70] Letters from Zeeman, 18 Jan 1931, from Guillaume, 25 Jan 1933, and from Sève, 21 Jan 1934. Nobelkommittén, report for 1931, 9–10 (Nobel).
The only hope of the old school, he thought, was to slip in before the committee could decide which of the inventors of accelerators or discoverers of new particles to reward first. It was in connection with the confusion and profusion of claimants that the eventual need to pick an accelerator physicist was first expressed in the correspondence of the Nobel committee. Dick Coster of the University of Groningen, writing in December 1933, suggested that the "artificial disintegration of nuclei by fast protons" might prove deserving; two years later Caltech's Richard Tolman took advantage of the throng—Lawrence, Lauritsen, Van de Graaff, and Cockcroft and Walton—to dismiss all in favor of Caltech's Anderson.[71] By 1938 Lawrence had outdistanced the rest in the building not only of machines but also of laboratories.
An instructive evaluation of the situation as it appeared to three nominators that year is preserved in the correspondence of O.W. Richardson (prize of 1928), who liked neither big nor nuclear physics. Bohr (prize of 1922) talked over options with him in December 1938. "After discussing a number of distinguished names, to several of which I would have been prepared to offer a measure of support, he finally decided on the combination of Lawrence and Kapitsa [another big machine, big laboratory man]. Well, what has Lawrence done? invented an instrument which would have been more or less obvious to anybody unfamiliar with the difficulties of experimental technique, made it to work, and done nothing with it, except to incite a large number of very able experimental physicists all over the world, unsuccessfully, to emulate his efforts. The wiser of them seem to have handed this trouble over to their students, but it is doubtful if that will help their generation! As for Kapitsa!!!" The addressee of this blast, G.P. Thomson (prize of 1937), who did some nuclear physics, returned the suggestion of Cockcroft without Walton. Bohr had also considered a prize for Cockcroft alone, but all recognized its unacceptability. In the end Bohr dropped Kapitsa, and Richardson and Thomson nominated E.V. Appleton, whose investigations concerned the upper atmosphere.[72]
[71] Letters to Nobelkommittén för Fysik from Guye, 19 Jan 1934; Coster, 14 Dec 1933; and Tolman, 2 Jan 1935 (Nobel).
[72] Richardson to Thomson, 12 and 24 Dec 1938 (Richardson P, 5).
Appleton had to wait until 1947. The Nobel committee was infatuated with nuclear physics and its machinery and willing to reward discoverers of the one and inventors of the other. Oliphant read Lawrence the significance of the committee's decision in 1939: "It is extremely encouraging to find that the Nobel Prize Committee, in common with many other authorities, is now recognizing the tremendous importance of technique in scientific investigations. . . . The technical side of the subject is now recognized as equally important with advances that follow from the use of these techniques, and more important, I hope, than the theories that endeavor to explain them. . . . It is certain that you have no difficulty now in raising funds for your 'father of all cyclotrons.'"[73]
German submarines kept Lawrence from the prize giving in Stockholm. The citation and medal were sent to the Swedish consul in San Francisco and presented at a ceremony on the Berkeley campus presided over by Sproul. Birge gave a speech reciting the accomplishments of Lawrence and the Laboratory. It was the evening of February 29, 1940. At the end of his prepared remarks, Birge announced the discovery of C14 to the crowd that filled the hall. "On the basis of its potential usefulness," Birge said, with exaggeration appropriate to the hour, "this is certainly much the most important radioactive substance that has yet been created."[74] Lawrence's reply carried two examples of his most effective technique. For one, he let Birge say what he himself wished to say without incurring any obligations: "As [Birge] has indicated, there are substantial prospects that [the next cyclotron] will be the instrument for finding the key to the almost limitless reservoir of energy in the heart of the atom." For another, he did not miss the opportunity for fund-raising. "It goes without saying that such a great recognition at this time will aid tremendously our efforts to find the necessary large funds for the next voyage of exploration into the depths of the atom." "[This] very considerable financial problem . . . we must now hand over to President Sproul."[75]
[73] Oliphant to Lawrence, 20 Nov 1939 (14/6).
[74] According to Kamen, Radiant science , 132–3.
[75] Quotes from, resp., Lawrence in U.C., 1939 prize , 36; draft of his acceptance talk (40/23); and 1939 prize , 35.
As we know, description of the cyclotron had always been a parade ground for military metaphors. The additional possibilities offered by the source of the Nobel prize carried the "University Explorer" to heights truly and doubly inspired. "Ernest Lawrence," he declared, "has discovered a blasting technique far more potent than anything Alfred Nobel ever dreamed of." R.W. Wood, an elder statesman of physics, improved the metaphor into prophecy. He wrote Lawrence: "As you are laying the foundations for the cataclysmic explosion of uranium (if anyone accomplishes the chain reaction) I'm sure old Nobel would approve."[76]