Movers and Shakers

The shift to long-range machine development, particularly x-ray apparatus and the cyclotron, made continuity of personnel desirable and, in the cases of Sloan and Livingston, necessary. Since in the first years of cyclotroneering Lawrence's grants did not include much if anything for academic salaries, he obtained temporary appointments for his most valuable associates in the Physics Department. On finishing his degree and the 11-inch cyclotron in 1931, Livingston became an instructor; on finishing his tenure as a Coffin Fellow, Sloan became a teaching assistant. A new pattern emerged in 1932/33. Since the Department did not reappoint instructors for a second year, Lawrence faced the grave problem in the spring of 1932 of retaining the invaluable Livingston, who could not afford to work for nothing. Sloan's progress on his commercially promising x-ray machine brought in enough to keep both him and Livingston, who received a half-time salary for setting up and running the Sloan tube at the University of California Medical School.^[41] These were the first stipends Lawrence raised from outside sources. The Laboratory continued to provide for Livingston until the summer of 1934, when he transferred his art and his dependence to Cornell, and for Sloan until 1937, although

his back injury made him a semi-invalid in 1934 and 1935.^[42]

Lawrence preferred to pay as little as possible for assistance. Money for wages was the most difficult of all to raise, since the foundations had a policy—to which, fortunately for him, they did not strictly adhere—that "the universities should provide the salaries of their research men."^[43] Here the Depression helped. Several of the most useful members of the Laboratory, for example, Malcolm Henderson, Jack Livingood, and Donald Cooksey, having private incomes and few prospects, paid their own ways for a time. In addition, and of utmost importance, as the reputation of the Laboratory grew, postdocs came with their own fellowship money, bringing new blood, labor, and expertise at no cost, and further advertising the Laboratory when they left it. The most frequent sources of these external rewards were the National Research Council and various agencies within the British Commonwealth, which contributed, respectively, seven and nine postdocs to the Laboratory during the 1930s, several of whom stayed for two years or more. The records for longevity belong to McMillan, who arrived in 1932 as a National Research Fellow, and Robert Thornton, who came on a Canadian fellowship. Both made their careers in the Laboratory. And there were always visitors, not only transients but residents for many months, like Frank Exner, Ryokichi Sagane, and Maurice Nahmias, who came to learn about the machines and ended by working on or with them. They, too, cost Lawrence nothing.

Appointments in the Physics Department kept many of Lawrence's people alive. Some twenty of them had teaching assistantships and/or university fellowships, generally two years of support, during their stay; and in each of the years 1936, 1937, and 1939, Lawrence achieved the feat, more notable together than the invention of the cyclotron, of placing one of his associates—Edwin McMillan, John Lawrence, and Luis Alvarez—in an assistant professorship. John Lawrence came from a junior faculty position at Yale, McMillan and Alvarez from instructorships at Berkeley, to which they rose from paid assistantships at the Laboratory, which

followed on a fellowship (McMillan) and on work without pay (Alvarez). A placement with similar payoff, although not engineered by Lawrence, was the appointment of Glenn Seaborg as instructor in the Chemistry Department, where he arrived after two years' service as Lewis's research assistant and Livingood's chemist.^[44]

The settlement of 1936 brought several state-funded positions: a director, at $2,000 a year (Lawrence); an assistant director, at $3,000 (Cooksey); two postdoctoral research associates, who received a minimum of $1,000 each; and several technical assistants.^[45] Some incumbents of these assistantships made capital contributions to the development of the machines, in particular, Charles Litton, then already the proprietor of his own engineering works, who had designed power oscillators for the Federal Telegraph Company; William Brobeck, a mechanical engineer, who took over general planning for new cyclotrons; and John A. Harvie, who came as a machinist in 1938 and ended as head of the machine shops of the postwar Laboratory. Brobeck's long association with the Laboratory began in the summer of 1937 in the ordinary way: he volunteered his services in exchange for an opportunity to learn cyclotron physics.^[46] Lower down on the support ladder stood part-time technicians like Arthur Chick, who began in May 1933 assembling amplifiers, rose to odd jobs at the Laboratory and around the Sloan tube at the Medical Center, and left to succeed Coates at the Sloan tube at Columbia; Eric Lehmann, an electrician who helped around the cyclotron from 1934 or 1935 on; WPA workers; and the "charming . . . , smiling, witty" Helen Griggs, who spun the heads of several cyclotroneers.^[47]

The trepanning of the medical purse allowed further expansion of personnel by providing stipends for the men who made isotopes and the men who improved the machines. A telling example is Livingood, who, having worked for nothing from 1932/33 to 1936/37, received a stipend from a Macy grant in 1937/38. When he immigrated to Harvard in the fall of 1938, his salary became available to Emilio Segrè, then emigrating from Palermo to Berkeley.^[48] A more obvious indicator is the number and sorts of people engaged in connection with the medical cyclotron: engineer Brobeck; technician Winfield Salisbury, who returned to the University expecting to complete a graduate career interrupted by industrial employment but "worked full time on cyclotron development and was unable to take any more courses;"^[49] and biophysicists Paul Aebersold and Joseph Hamilton, who came to work with John Lawrence. In all, Lawrence's grants paid for at least fifty man-years of labor during the 1930s.

A chart of the Laboratory's primary academic workers—staff, students, and long-term visitors—during the 1930s indicates their impressive growth in numbers (table 5.4). During the first two years, 1930/32, when Sloan and Livingston set the technical basis of further advance, Lawrence had about five workers a year (plate 5.1). With the setting up of "the little grey rat-trap," the "original cyclotroneers training school," "cyclotron headquarters," "the Mecca of cyclotronists," that is, the Radiation Laboratory, the number of academic workers rose to an average of fifteen during the quadrennium 1932/36.^[50] Lawrence for once had more than he could handle, and briefly discouraged even volunteers from coming to Berkeley.^[51] Among these fifteen were Bernard Kinsey, Franz Kurie, Edwin McMillan, Arthur Snell, Robert Thornton, and Stanley Van Voorhis, all extremely able tenants of extramural postdoctoral fellowships. With the deed of independence of the Labora-

tory, generous state financing, and bountiful external support consequent on the clinical potential of radioisotopes and neutron beams, the Laboratory's complement of academic workers more than doubled, to an average of thirty-five during the quadrennium 1936/40. And that was by no means more than Lawrence then thought he could use: "The number of men that can be kept profitably at work in connection with a [cyclotron] project is almost unlimited."^[52] An account of the makeup of the Laboratory in a few representative years will put some flesh on these statistical bones.

Near the beginning of the first four-year period, in 1933/34, Lawrence had two unsupported graduate students at work on old business, photo-electricity (Cyrus Clark) and big sparks (Harvey White), and five on projects connected with accelerators. These were Leo Linford and Daniel Posin, who examined the debris from targets struck by high-speed mercury ions from Sloan's linac; Milton White, who used the 11-inch cyclotron to study proton-proton scattering; and Sloan and Hugh Paxton, who were trying to increase the intensity of the cyclotron's beams. Each of the six research associates of that year had his own project and most also collaborated in an intricate set of related researches: Kurie, a National Research Fellow, perfected his cloud chamber and studied neutron activation; McMillan, likewise a National Research Fellow, made his measurements on gamma rays, in which he was joined by Henderson, Livingston, and Lawrence; Henderson, self-supporting, and Livingston, on x-ray money, worked on deuteron disintegration; and Thornton, on a fellowship from McGill, and Bernard Kinsey, on a Commonwealth fellowship, tried to make a useful beam of lithium ions. These men brought not only the joy, but also the mess of research. "I have had to take on all the duties of a Director," Lawrence wrote his own thesis director, W.F.G. Swann, as he fought with the University to restore the janitorial services that had been discontinued as a Depression meas-

ure. "It would be manifestly impossible to get the fellows themselves to tidy up the Laboratory."^[53]

In the first full year of the Laboratory's independence, 1936/37, the number of Lawrence's graduate students rose to a dozen, of external Fellows to seven, and of paid staff to ten exclusive of himself and Cooksey. The fellowship holders were Paul Aebersold in radiation biology, with support from the Medical School; Donald Hurst, on a Canadian scholarship, and Arthur Snell, an 1851 Exhibitioner; Wilfred Mann and Harold Walke, Commonwealth Fellows; Fred Fairbrother, Leverhulme Fellow; and Stanley Van Voorhis, National Research Fellow. A second National Research Fellow, Dean Wooldridge, elected to resign his award in favor of a job at Bell Labs.^[54] The paid staff: Alvarez and John Lawrence, en route to assistant professorships; Dean Cowie, "an unusually ambitious and capable man and the hardest worker I have ever seen, yourself [Lawrence] included;" Count Lorenzo Emo Capodalista, who had learned his physics in Florence; Kurie, whose fellowship had expired; the perennial Sloan; L. Jackson Laslett and Paxton, now graduated, both of whom would soon go to Europe to help build cyclotrons; and the technicians Chick and Litton. There were also an unpaid Research Fellow (Livingood) and the free "Junior Research Associates," alias graduate students, Philip Abelson, David Kalbfell, Ernest Lyman, J.R. Richardson (on a University fellowship), and S.J. Simmons.^[55]

By the steady-state year 1937/38, there were some forty people attached closely enough to the Laboratory to be eligible for appearance in its group photograph (plate 5.2). Lawrence could not contrive to retain the growing number of senior people on his junior staff once their fellowship or parental support had run out. In this matter of jobs he was extremely generous, even self-denying; he encouraged outside offers to his best men, whom he hoped to retain, like McMillan and Alvarez. "I shall get as many

good offers as possible," he wrote McMillan in the spring of 1935, "and allow the decision for next year to be made by [the] individuals [concerned]." And he had no trouble collecting offers; by 1935 interest in cyclotrons had become "extraordinarily gratifying (indeed amazing)." Berkeley veterans were soon building machines all over the country.^[56]

Lawrence used the demand to bargain for regular rather than year-to-year appointments for his younger associates. In 1938, when ninety people applied for a single job in the physics department at the City College of New York, the Laboratory easily placed eight postdocs, each with several years' experience with the cyclotron, at leading research universities: Kurie, whom Lawrence recommended over Alvarez, went to Indiana; Langsdorf to Washington University in Saint Louis; Laslett, whom Cooksey rated over Kurie and Lawrence esteemed highly ("the outstanding graduate student [of 1936]"), to Michigan; Livingood to Harvard; Lyman to Illinois; Paxton, whom Lawrence likened to Milton White, successfully established at Princeton, to Columbia; Snell, whom Lawrence wished particularly to retain for cyclotronics, to Chicago; and Van Voorhis, "[a] storehouse of information . . . , a most amazing man," to Rochester.^[57] "What are you going to do for help next year when all your men are leaving?" a cyclotroneer from the East asked Cooksey. It was "very distressing," Cooksey replied, since they happened to be "one's best friends;" but their leaving would not cripple the Laboratory. There remained McMillan (whom Princeton had approached), Alvarez, and Brobeck, Cooksey reminded his questioner, and half a dozen postdocs, "all of whom know the game from A to Z," and, among the graduate students, "two or three new men who are tops, [and] who

already know the game."^[58] They, too, would be, indeed were, in demand. Lawrence invited MIT to make any offer it pleased to any of them; but no one very good, he warned, would go for anything less than an assistant professorship.^[59] Weaver worried that the exodus of 1938 might injure the Laboratory. Lawrence seemed unconcerned. "[He had] so many fine younger men coming on that he does not feel badly about giving up his more experienced men."^[60]