3—
Depression and Its Cure

Sloan may have been made the readier to leave GE by observation of the havoc the Depression was wreaking on its research staff. Eventually GE cut back to 50 percent of its strength in 1929; the corresponding figure for AT&T was 40 percent. They suffered, but not as much as the bellwether of economic activity, the steel industry, which was running at a jot over one-quarter of its capacity two years after the stock market crashed. The first nine months of 1931 had been "one of the most unsettled, depressed periods ever known," and the balance of the year looked worse. In the first half of September, tax receipts fell lower than at any time in the preceding decade, and the production of electric power, the agent of industrial vitality and domestic comfort, was diminishing at the rate of 2 percent a week. The vital signs of capitalism slowed to just above moribund; in the opinion of Time , the country "had reached the lowest possible level of consumption."^[67] Even the mortality rate declined, probably, in the opinion of the Health Organization of the League of Nations, because idleness preserved the population from the dangers of fast living and tuberculosis.^[68]

The Depression did not hurt most of the nation's physicists as quickly as it did the steel industry. To be sure, industrial research laboratories cut their staffs, and government agencies, particularly the National Bureau of Standards, had to furlough many of their scientific workers without pay and sustain a devastating amputation from their research budgets.^[69] Most American physicists—some 75 percent of the membership of the American Physical Society in 1930—did not work for the federal government or for industry, however, but for universities and colleges. And the universities, especially the large research universities like Berkeley and Caltech, had their best years ever in 1929/30 and 1930/31. By all outward signs—size of faculties and student bodies, receipts, expenditures—the research universities were the ivory towers of their legend, cut off from the hard practical life around them. The average annual gifts from private sources to these universities between 1929 and 1931 totaled the average in the mid 1920s.^[70]

The towers were not made of ivory, but of steel, and, as the recent war had made sufficiently clear, they were strongly coupled to the welfare of the nation. Beginning in 1932, decreases in giving, in interest on endowment, and in state support, forced the universities to economize. Senior faculty took a reduction in salary, perhaps 15 percent, across the country; junior faculty suffered most, as is their wont, many being cut out altogether; and research funds from endowments, state appropriations, and external grants fell in proportion.^[71] The general method of coping during the bad years, 1932/33 through 1934/35, appears from the steps taken by Berkeley's physics department to meet its severest test, the apportionment of a 20 percent cut in its state allocation for 1933/34. After senior faculty had agreed to a "voluntary" reduction in salary that averaged about 7 percent, they righteously slashed the wages of temporary instructors, axed six of twenty-four

teaching assistants, cut the chairman's contingency fund, and knocked down their research provision by a third.^[72] It was in this friendly environment that Lawrence went about raising money for his cyclotrons.

Lawrence managed to squeeze money from a university that claimed to have none in ways we shall delight to chronicle. He also teased out money from foundations, a great support of university research during the 1920s, which had of course suffered in the general financial decline. In 1931, their last good year, 122 foundations gave a total of $52 million, of which $19 million went to medicine and public health and $5 million to research in natural sciences; in 1934 the same number could manage only $34 million, of which $9 million went to medicine and public health and $2 million to the natural sciences. Even in 1940, with a third again as many foundations, giving fell considerably short of the levels of 1930/31. Throughout, however, one thing stayed constant: medical science received four times as much as all the natural sciences combined, and the amount given directly for research in physics (as opposed to fellowships) was a small fraction of the amount available for the biological and physical sciences. In 1937, for example, cancer research received ten times the money (some $17,000!) classified by the foundations as their total direct contribution to research in physics.^[73] Lawrence eventually looked to medicine to cure his chronic budgetary ills, and to the Rockefeller Foundation, the largest philanthropy during the 1930s in both outlay and book value.^[74] His first patron, the Research Corporation, small and not medical, suffered grievously during the depths of the Depression. Its income sank in 1932, and, as its president wrote Lawrence that August urging the expenditure of more ingenuity and fewer dollars, the outlook was "quite

discouraging." By the following June, with the University and the Research Corporation crying poor, Lawrence had to acknowledge the chief current bar to research initiatives: "Money is considerably scarcer now than it was three years ago."^[75]

The drop in available capital was offset, from the standpoint of the academic research entrepreneur, by a pool of cheap trained labor. "The main result of the depression," Birge wrote in the fall of 1932, "has been that we have more graduate students than ever before and about a dozen visiting fellows. . . . We are suffering, as it were, from a superfluity of riches." By then there were no jobs in universities, industries, and government research agencies. Fresh Ph.D.'s remained at their home institutions, continuing their work and "living on I know not what."^[76] They came begging to work, to stay in their fields, to keep up to date until jobs opened again. The situation at the very depth of the Depression, when researchers were less than a dime a dozen, emerges from an exchange in the autumn of 1932 between Lawrence and his then recent Ph.D. Laurence Loveridge, who had worked on alkali spectra. Ill, depressed, with no prospects, Loveridge had fished in all the agencies and got not a single nibble. "It looks as if my only chance is to go to one of the larger universities [to] do some research and try to get enough tutoring or reading on the side to live on." Could he return to Berkeley as an unpaid research associate? Lawrence would not advise it: he already had a half-dozen Ph.D.'s working gratis in the Radiation Laboratory and trying to peck a living from the barren academic landscape.^[77] Other research universities experienced a like glut of volunteers.^[78]

Berkeley was particularly well placed to profit from this grim rush. Its low cost of living compared with most other major university centers sank even lower as the consumer price index fell to three-fourths of its value in 1929/30. Since in 1930 a graduate

student could obtain a room at $12 to $15 a month, and board at a dollar a day, his minimal needs in 1933/34 could be met for under $40 a month. Anyone lucky enough to find a half-time job at the going rate of 50 cents an hour could just make do; a fellowship holder or teaching assistant with $600 a year could afford to treat his less fortunate fellow students to lunch.^[79] The sight of the brigade of volunteer Ph.D.'s did not deter graduate students from finishing their programs or recruits from entering; and, with an almost imperceptible stutter, the number of new doctors of physics in the country kept rising through the 1930s at the same rate as it had during the 1920s, doubling each decade to almost 200 in 1940.

By 1935 many of these fledglings were finding jobs as soon as they found their wings. In 1936 MIT had more calls from industry for its graduates in physics than it could hope to fill. The cycle, in which, as A.W. Hull explained in a talk at the University of Pittsburgh, the industrial physicist is "a luxury indulged in as a speculation during prosperity and dropped when adversity threatens," had turned quickly. It is doubtful that many more than a dozen Ph.D.'s in physics created in the 1930s were permanently lost to the profession because of the Depression. The improvement in the prospects of the graduates reflected a general recovery of the research universities, which by 1935/36 had faculties larger than ever before and rising research budgets. Here the great state universities had a better time than the private ones, since state revenues went up faster than return on endowments.^[80]

More Science or Less?

"The prevalent feeling is that of imminent perdition and extinction." These are the words not of a depressed observer of the Great Depression but of Max Nordau, a physician and literary critic, who thus characterized European civilization in the 1890s. He and his fellow doctors of degeneracy traced many of the social ills

of the fin de siècle to rampant science and uncontrolled technology: to science for removing mystery, spirit, poetry, and choice from the world, for undermining religion and the family and breeding socialism; to technology for encouraging the growth of cities, with their bad air, poor public hygiene, adulterated food, and, worst of all, their frantic pace, driven by the factory and aggravated by the daily press. It occurred to some that society would do well to clamp down on its scientists and engineers, to enact a moratorium on research: "Progress . . . may be too fast for endurance."^[81] This mood evaporated with the multiplication of comforts by electricity and the inauguration of the arms race in Europe preceding the Great War. As we know, the war so raised the stock of physical science and its applications that, in the opinion of lobbyists like the NRC, a progressive country could not have enough of it.

Sed contra , nothing could be plainer than that the uncontrolled exploitation of scientific knowledge did not always net an increase in human happiness. Had not science enriched the slaughter on the battlefield? And was it not still claiming victims in the 1920s, like the telephone operators thrown out of work by the geniuses who invented direct dialing?^[82] Since destruction and dislocation attended the deployment of science-based technology, said the bishop of Ripon, setting out some themes from the fin de siècle before an unpromising audience at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1927, "the sum of human happiness, outside of scientific circles, would not necessarily be reduced if for, say ten years, every physical and chemical laboratory were closed and the patient and resourceful energy displayed in them transferred to recovering the lost art of getting together and finding a formula for making the ends meet in the scale of human life." The bishop's half-serious remark excited only the slightest flurry in the United States, where the eagles of science repeated, with George Ellery Hale, that "our place in the intellectual world, the advance of our industries and our commerce, the health of our people, the production of our farms . . . , and the

prosperity and security of the nation depend upon our cultivation of pure science," and where the general public was preparing to choose a mining engineer as its president. Millikan inveighed (his usual mode of debate) against a moratorium as an "unpardonable sin." The New York Times answered the bishop in a metaphor that summed up the experience of the century: "A ten-year truce on the battle fields of science . . . is absolutely unthinkable."^[83]

It became thinkable in the Great Depression. In 1934 the Times recalled that "even before the depression the world was puffing in its efforts to keep pace with science" and challenged scientists to explain why the industrial machine had stopped. Many influential people confused science with its applications and blamed both for the collapse. Raymond Fosdick, trustee and future president of the Rockefeller Foundation: "Science has exposed the paleolithic savage, masquerading in modern dress, to a sudden shift of environment which theatens to unbalance his brain." Hoover's Committee on Recent Social Trends: "Unless there is a speeding up of social invention or a slowing down of mechanical invention, grave maladjustments are certain to result." Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago: "Science and the free intelligence of men . . . have failed us." Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture: "[Scientists and engineers] have turned loose upon the world new productive power without regard to the social implications."^[84] The brutal curtailment of research at the National Bureau of Standards and other federal agencies was a matter of mood as well as of money. Similar considerations affected the states. As W.W. Campbell summed it up from his new eminence as president of the National Academy of Sciences: "The attitude of many, perhaps nearly all, of the legislatures toward research at public expense may fairly be

described as unsympathetic and, in some cases . . . , as severely hostile."^[85]

This time prominent scientists tried to listen. Frank Jewett, vicepresident of AT&T and president of Bell Telephone Laboratories, allowed in 1932, at the dedication of the Hall of Science at the Century of Progress Exposition, that science and technology had had adverse effects. He proposed as cure, in addition to more science, the education of scientists to take into account the social problems their work might create. In 1934 the same sour note sounded at the Nobel prize ceremonies, and, in a lesser venue, at the American Physical Society, whose president told its members that "a thorough investigation of the sociological aspects of physics" was one of the two most important matters before them. The other was "organized propaganda for physics."^[86]

The members of Roosevelt's Science Advisory Board, set up in 1933, also acknowledged the need for a scientific analysis of social and economic problems, although they could enlist no one to undertake it. Henry Wallace, speaking for the new administration, urged attention to social engineering and to the humanizing of the engineer by courses in philosophy and poetry. It was a desperate remedy, to be sure, since literature might sap the vigor of an engineer, but then the situation was desperate: "I would be tempted to solve [the difficulty] by saying that probably no great harm would be done if a certain amount of technical efficiency in engineering were traded for a somewhat broader base in general culture."^[87] Roosevelt himself called attention to declarations by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in favor of serious study of the social relations of science and asked whether American engineering schools had introduced economics and social science into their curricula. He addressed this question in the fall of 1936 to the former head of his defunct Science Advisory Board, Karl T. Compton, president of MIT, the eastern and better behaved counterpart of Caltech's Millikan. Compton

returned the opinion shared by the leadership of the NAS and the NRC: the country does not need engineers and scientists distracted by literature and sociology, but more, better, and costlier science.^[88]

This hard line was the theme of a symposium held in February 1934 under the auspices of the American Institute of Physics and the New York Electrical Society. Karl Compton led off: "The idea that science takes away jobs, or in general is at the root of our economic and social ills, is contrary to fact, is based on ignorance or misconception, [and] is vicious in its possible social consequences." And popular. "The spread of this idea is threatening to reduce public support of scientific work . . . , to stifle further technical improvements . . . , [to bring] economic disadvantage in respect to foreign countries . . . , [to precipitate] a national calamity." At this Compton, as head of the Science Advisory Board, hoped to draw $5 million annually from the U.S. Treasury for support of scientific research outside of government agencies. In Compton's "best science" vision, the NAS and NRC would supervise the spending: only they could direct fire at the right targets (as he later said, in the common metaphor), and, without political or regional considerations, extract silk from wood, rubber from weeds, gasohol from corn, and, into the bargain, complete the electrification of the country.^[89] Roosevelt's social engineers would have nothing of the scheme and postponed eager federal support of physical science to the next shooting war. The president threw a small bone to the hunting dogs of science: in 1935 he qualified scientific research for support by the Works Progress Administration. Since the WPA could only assist people who had lost their jobs, and since, in science, these were often the least qualified, its program detractors sometimes labelled it "worst science" support.^[90]

Where then to find the money for scientific research that the Comptons and Millikans and Jewetts thought necessary to national recovery? A startling answer was given by Hull, Lawrence's sometime patron at GE's laboratories. Hull took it for granted that physics would lose the privileged position that break-throughs in electronics had given it since the war. He did not expect much help from government, and nothing in the near term from foundations or industry. "We should face the problem of carrying forward the torch of physical science with not only unabated, but accelerated speed, without additional facilities." How then? By enlisting high-school teachers in research, certainly not a "best science" approach, and, as Hull acknowledged, not an easy one either, since most teachers were already overworked. But, on reflection, that might be an inducement: "If happiness is proportional to accomplishment . . . , [and accomplishment to effort,] then more, not less, overwork should be our goal."^[91]

A more practical goal was to prepare the physicists that industry might absorb when business improved. It was agreed that the United States had not progressed so rapidly in industrial as in academic physics.^[92] It was further agreed that fresh Ph.D.'s did not enter industry with the tools needed to succeed there: an ability to work in groups and to attack problems en masse, the imagination to disregard "the imaginary boundaries between different branches of science and technology," and, above all, a knowledge of chemistry and "the realization that there is a field in physics outside of atomic structure and wave mechanics."^[93]

The American Way

American physicists worked and spent their way out of the Depression. There were close approximations to Sinclair Lewis's Doctor Arrowsmith among them—men eager to maximize overwork, rough around the edges (Arrowsmith did not know "a symphony from a savory"), thoroughly dedicated to their science,

their careers, and, at second remove, their neighbors. Harold C. Urey, a student of G.N. Lewis's, was one of the most successful of these men. His great discovery of heavy water, made in 1932 after much hard work by himself and selfless colleagues, immediately found application in physics and chemistry, and, what had greater social value, biology; it also lifted the spirits of beleaguered scientists and won Urey a Nobel prize. In 1937, in an address at the dedication of a new building at the Mellon Institute for Technological Research, Urey voiced Arrowsmith's creed: "We wish to abolish drudgery, discomfort and want from the lives of men and bring them pleasure, comfort, leisure and beauty. . . . The results of our work completely outdistance our dreams. . . . You may bury our bodies where you will, our epitaphs are written in our scientific journals, our monuments are the industries which we build, which without our magic touch would never be."^[94]

One of Lawrence's most brilliant students of the Depression years, Robert Wilson, a midwesterner like Arrowsmith (and Lawrence), fed his fancy with the heroics of Lewis's doctor when riding the range in Wyoming. Arrived at Berkeley, he dismounted to find his ideal in charge of a radiation laboratory.^[95] During his early years at Berkeley, Lawrence did have many of Arrowsmith's qualities. Like the doctor, he had two passions, one science, the other the daughter of a physician on the faculty at Yale. "I have two consuming loves," he wrote his great friend Donald Cooksey in the summer of 1931, "Molly and research!" "I am so badly (or goodly) in love that at times it is positively painful." And, like Arrowsmith, Lawrence was boyish and unsophisticated, open in his enthusiasms, in a word—the word was Oppenheimer's—"unspoiled." He believed that to start work was to begin to improve, and that more science, not less, would liberate from psychological as well as economic depression. He labored hard on these principles, so hard that he often fell a victim to severe colds, which increased in frequency in step with the growth of his laboratory.^[96] As Arrowsmith discovered, fulfilling one's scientific

ambitions according to the highest standards while running a large research institution constantly in need of money may not be possible. Lewis's doctor hero cleared his conscience by an unrealistic escape to a small workplace in the wilderness; Berkeley's Lawrence cut corners, lost innocence, and built the largest laboratory for nuclear science in the world.

Arrowsmith's ferocious pace in pursuit of truth, his almost athletic performances in the laboratory, were characteristically American. The "feverish exploration for the secrets of matter's composition" (as Science Service described research in nuclear physics in 1934) impressed European observers of science in the United States. Would you care to think more about it, Rudolf Peierls wrote Hans Bethe about a joint paper, "or do you insist on publishing in American tempo?" Haste makes waste. Bethe had become almost a legend for his error-free calculations. But in a recent paper he had made two numerical mistakes in one single table. "Is that America," Peierls asked, "or the automobile?"^[97]

As American as the fast pace was the big machine. Already before the war, the size and variety of equipment in American physics institutes "made [a European's] mouth water."^[98] It appeared to Franz Simon, who surveyed facilities for low-temperature research in the United States in 1932, that "Americans seem to work very well, only they obviously insist on making everything as big as possible." A few years later, Paul Capron of the University of Louvain expressed perfectly the standard impression made on Continentals by the research facilities in the United States: "In Princeton as in Columbia University, I was most amazed by the richness of the laboratory. . . . [At MIT] I saw the most extraordinary technics [i.e., instrumentation]." He returned to Belgium, inspired by the American spirit, the "constructive civilization of 'go ahead.'"^[99] From machine worship

there is but a step to materialism, the last and heaviest ingredient in the European depreciation of American culture. A good American answer to this stale charge came from an immigrant inventor, Michael Pupin, who accepted it, played with it, gloried in it. What we do in America, he said, results from close study of nature, which enhances the spirit; and nature happens to be a machine. "The [artificial] machine is the visible evidence of the close union between man and the spirit of the eternal truth which guides the subtle hand of nature."^[100]

The American physicist projected his image at home with the willing help of the press. The collaboration, which was first struck just after the war with Science Service and with the coverage of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1922, entered a new stage in April 1934, with the formation of the National Association of Science Writers and the call from the podium of the American Physical Society for propaganda for physics. One of the leaders of the writers' association was David Dietz, the science editor for the Scripps-Howard newspapers. Dietz volunteered the help of his organization in "selling physics to the public," when, at a conference on applied science held late in 1934, Saul Dushman of GE expressed the hope that the selling "would be done without impairing the dignity of science." In 1935, at a conference on industrial physics in Pittsburgh, Dietz observed that the only way to get $50 million a year from the government—$50 million being the loss in research money owing to the Depression, according to the American Institute of Physics—was to work on public opinion. "Your best allies in creating public support for science are the newspapers," Dietz said. "There is a new understanding today between the world of science and the newspaper world."^[101] The director of Science Service , Watson Davis, took the same line. Nowadays, he said, in a speech in February 1936, science writers follow science with the same attentiveness and understanding that sports reporters lavish on football. Their relation is symbiotic: the scientist reveals, the

reporter "detechnicalizes." "These essentially changed attitudes on the part of the press and the world of science are among the most encouraging signs of our times." No fewer than sixteen reporters showed up at the AAAS meeting in December 1935. That suited the science lobby perfectly. Austin Clark, the press director of the AAAS echoed Dietz: "We must all work together in order that the press may have an abundance of suitable material to present to the public."^[102] It remained only to take the step, which would have been anathema to Arrowsmith, of fusing business with research. This Maurice Holland, the director of the Division of Engineering and Industrial Research of the NRC, did not disdain to do. "There seems to be some connection between selling and science—I, for one, believe they are brothers under the skin."^[103]

At first Arrowsmith-Lawrence drew back from selling, in public at least. "We are not interested in publicity," he wrote a would-be reporter in 1934. In this policy he had been encouraged by a newspaper report that he was trying to transmute base metal into gold and by Molly, who thought it "unfortunate that the Research Council [i.e., Corporation] etc. have demanded so much publicity on your work."^[104] But Lawrence could not long affect this other-wordly attitude. When the president of the University asked him to talk to the Rotary Club of Berkeley, and to furnish a copy "in order that we may use it for publicity in the newspapers of the state," Lawrence could only reply that he would be "more than glad to do so." He became expert in dealing with Dietz and company; and his benefactors came to request that he write press releases to satisfy the curiosity of the newspapers. An example of his handiwork, anent a grant from the National Advisory Cancer Council, which dispensed federal money: "[The] strikingly rapid

development of these powerful new weapons in the war on cancer [he meant cyclotrons] is a splendid example of the fruitfulness of the active interest and support of the government in medical research [the government had had nothing directly to do with financing cyclotrons], for it may be truly said that the National Advisory Cancer Council has greatly accelerated the day in our generation when countless cancer sufferers may be benefitted by these new radiations."^[105] The fallen Doctor Arrowsmith himself became a journalistic object, attaining the frontispiece of Time in 1937 and the insides of Scientific American in 1940.^[106]

A Solution

An enduring feature of "science" reporting during the 1930s was atomic energy. Scientists had raised the possibility from the time of the discovery of radioactive decay among the natural elements in 1902. The measurement of the masses of hydrogen and helium to unusual precision in 1922 by Francis Aston of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, gave perhaps the first substantial ground for hope or fear that civilization might run or destroy itself by exploiting the atom. Aston found that four atoms of hydrogen have a greater mass than one of helium; should it be possible to synthesize helium from hydrogen, Einstein's law of equivalency between mass and energy promised that something noteworthy would ensue. According to his calculations, Aston said, the hydrogen in a pint of water could yield enough energy to drive a steamship across the ocean and back; or "the transmutation might be beyond control and result in the detonation of all the water on the earth," a possibility he considered "interesting" but remote. If all went well, "there would be literally no limit to the material achievements of the human race."^[107]

Most reputable physicists, Max Planck for example, wrote of the need, desirability, and eventual practicality of "the liberation

of atomic energy."^[108] Scientists who thought practical atomic energy farfetched or impossible found it awkward to protest, since they would open themselves to the difficult duty of proving an impossibility. Millikan was one of the few physicists who then talked regularly with the Creator and could know the impossibility of the release of useful or destructive atomic energy. One of the favorite arguments of those who favored a moratorium in physical research turned on the likelihood that unsupervised physicists might discover a way and unprepared society might blow itself to bits. No chance, said Millikan. His observations of cosmic rays, which showed that the sort of synthesis Aston contemplated could not occur on earth, and his calculations about radioactive decay, which showed that atomic disintegration could not power a popcorn machine, demonstrated sufficiently that God had made the universe proof against destruction by inquisitive physicists. "There is not even a remote likelihood that man can ever tap this source of energy at all."^[109]

Millikan was gainsaid by the Compton brothers: by Arthur, who discredited Caltech's conception of cosmic rays, and by Karl, who, in January 1933, predicted the arrival of useful atomic energy—or, at least, of "the most exciting and far-reaching developments in the whole history of science"—within a generation.^[110] The venue for this utterance could not have been more public or more appropriate: the Century of Progress Exposition, whose centerpiece was a huge robot, signifying science, pushing a man and a woman into the future. The high-tech razzle-dazzle of the exposition incorporated a "philosophy of showmanship for the contributions of science and their applications" developed by a committee headed by Frank Jewett in cooperation with the NRC. No mundane signal like the radio call that activated the Diesel at the San Francisco fair would do for Chicago: the Century of

Progress Exposition came to life at the command of forty-year-old light from the star Arcturus collected at several observatories and forwarded by Western Union. As F.K. Richtmeyer, dean of the Graduate School of Cornell, said in celebration, "Scientific research pays large dividends." Would the study of the atom do so? When? "There is no telling," according to the dean, "when a scientific Columbus is going to discover another America."^[111]

Compton's prediction and others even less responsible excited what Lawrence called a "newspaper ballyhoo." That was too much for the great proprietor of the nucleus, Lord Rutherford, who thundered before the British Association in the fall of 1933 that "anyone who says that with the means at present at our disposal and with our present knowledge we can utilize atomic energy is talking moonshine." The thunder made the front page of the New York Herald Tribune , with some echoes by American physicists. The editors of Scientific American applauded Rutherford's statement, although, they said, it was hardly scientific to rule out the possibility. Against them stood Lawrence, who by then was shooting at nuclei with projectiles from his cyclotron. To him, according to the Tribune , release of useful energy is "purely a matter of marksmanship."^[112] This view of the matter appears to have attracted the attention of Einstein. At a conference arranged by the new National Association of Science Writers, he disparaged the efficacy of Lawrence's artillery. "'You see,' he said, with his characteristic sense of humor and picturesque expression, 'it is like shooting birds in the dark in a country where there are only a few birds.'"^[113]

Against the public declarations of Rutherford and Einstein, and within an environment not favorable to an economic transformation of the sort that atomic power was expected to bring ("It appears doubtful . . . whether coal mining or oil production could survive after a couple of years"),^[114] Lawrence thought it prudent

to blunt his many hints that nuclear physicists might open the atom for business. In the early 1930s these hints came primarily in direct connection with victualling his laboratory. In a memorandum of accomplishments written in 1933, for example, he pointed to data indicating the release of energy in disintegration, and hinted, "This is a matter of great scientific interest and eventually may have a practical application." In asking for the renewal of a student's fellowship, he wrote that the experiments it supported "have the possibility of contributing knowledge which may ultimately lead to utilization of [the] vast store of atomic energy." Nor did he disdain to make the same point when requesting the loan of a pound of beryllium from an industrial supplier: "If a means can be found for stimulating on a large scale the explosion of beryllium nuclei, a practically unlimited store of energy is thereby made available."^[115]

By the mid 1930s Lawrence was in great demand as a speaker. He often took the opportunity to hint at practical atomic energy. The "University Explorer," a radio show originating at the University of California and carried by the networks, asked him in 1936 what the future might hold. "I'm almost afraid to guess," he replied. "Speaking officially, as one scientist, I can only say that we are going to continue our studies." And unofficially? "Certainly we are much closer to [the release of subatomic energy] than we were a few years ago. . . . If we can discover a method of starting chain reactions . . . the problem would be solved." Again, speaking officially, at commencement exercises at the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1937: "It is only of interest [here, at this engineering school, where speculation has no place] to indicate the present state of knowledge with proper humility." Current knowledge made the release of atomic energy appear "fantastic;" no one had any idea how to do it and the second law of thermodynamics might forbid it. And yet, unofficially: "It is conceivable that in our lifetime this great principle [the transformation of mass into energy] will play a vital role in technical developments which at

the moment are beyond our dreams—for such has been the history of science."^[116]

By this time, 1937, the nucleus had become the enduring fad of physics. A marginal topic before the crash, it was absorbing 10 percent of the efforts of physical scientists, as reported in Science Abstracts , during the depths of the Depression. The increase of interest and labor, as expressed by the content of the the Physical Review , was so sharp that even the numbers that represent it are dramatic: in 1932, 8 percent of its articles, letters, and abstracts concerned nuclear physics; in 1933, 18 percent; in 1937, 32 percent.^[117] Men beginning their careers in physics in the early 1930s saw the nucleus as (to quote one of them) an unstudied frontier, a research land of opportunity, a gold field. The young Otto Robert Frisch, a Viennese who had studied all over Europe, wrote of the nucleus—the unerforschtes Neuland , the Goldfelder —like a Forty-niner.^[118] The metaphor was most apt. Although several of the key discoveries that excited interest in the nucleus during the Depression were not made in the United States, the Americans, with their big machines and high pressure, very quickly dominated the field. And the field dominated them. A physicist inexpert in nuclear physics in 1937 was, according to one of them, Arnold Sommerfeld, who had taught atomic theory to all of Europe, "completely uneducated by American standards."^[119]

At the head of the American expeditionary force against the nuclear citadel stood Ernest Lawrence. He was the quintessential American leader, active, youthful, optimistic. He had built while others idled, sustained while others retrenched, inspired while others doubted. "The trade of a 'cyclotroneer,'" wrote one of his students in an unintended double entendre, "is one which has experienced no depression."^[120]

Was the cyclotron "a product of the land of the Golden Gate"? The question was put to Donald Cooksey, then Lawrence's alter ego, by a reporter at the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939. Cooksey was standing in the exposition's Hall of Science, before a full-scale model of the latest cyclotron. The model used steel balls accelerated by gravity to knock apart a representation of a lithium atom, "which is unable to defend itself against such vigorous attack, and is blown to bits." But is it Californian? "It literally and truly is," Cooksey replied. "Practically coincident with the opening of this marvelous Exposition [on San Francisco Bay] is the culmination of years of development [at Berkeley] of the world's largest cyclotron." Attempting to reduce its capacity to his audience's, Cooksey estimated that it would shoot more "atomic bullets" in one second than all the real bullets that all the machine guns in the world could fire off during the entire life of the exposition. "Or more than one gun could fire in three million years."^[121] How this machine and its predecessors came to be created in California, how their sizes and uses grew, how they and their makers spread throughout the land, and how the machines and the men went off to war, are the main subjects of this book.