Skinning Fat Cats

Lawrence was planning to build far beyond the Bethe-Rose limit even before the 60-inch machine, which itself crossed the suppositious threshold, came on line. It was not relativity, but money, he said in a radio broadcast in the spring of 1939, that stood in his way. "Right now we are considering the possible financial difficulties of constructing a cyclotron to weigh 2,000 tons and to produce 100 million volt particles. . . . It would require more than half a million dollars."^[18] Both the size and the price were to grow during the next year with the help of the University of Texas and the Nobel Foundation, and with the encouragement of big-thinking colleagues. "I hope your new apparatus is really big," Chadwick wrote, with 60 or 70 MeV in mind. "Best wishes for the beam to end all beams. The best is none too good for the Berkeley boys," wrote I.I. Rabi of Columbia, who would later try

to snatch the best from Berkeley in the interests of East Coast physics.^[19]

Lawrence faced difficulties beyond the relativistic and the financial. For one, there was no uncontested space for a 2,000-ton cyclotron on the Campus. An engineering annex had been needed to house the 27-inch; a special building had been erected for the 60-inch; real estate as large as the Campus would be reserved for the new machine. Then there was a taint of overreaching, of imprudent haste, of gluttony, in the plan. "In some quarters it might be considered no less than shocking that we should be looking towards a larger cyclotron almost before the 60 inch is in operation."^[20] And finally, there was the disagreeable fact that no major discovery had yet been made in any cyclotron laboratory. As Arthur Compton and his colleague A.J. Dempster pointed out to the Rockefeller Foundation, cosmic-ray physicists had made several of the most spectacular discoveries in physics during the 1930s, in particular the positron and the mesotron, and cosmic rays come gratis.^[21]

To this objection Lawrence replied with a claim about the might-have-been and a statement of the what-should-be. The claim: cyclotron physicists had missed the discoveries through a compulsion to perfect their machines; in due course they would have found what others detected earlier with more primitive means. The statement: a discovery has little value unless it can be turned to practical use. "It means a great deal more to civilization, let us say, to find a new radiation or a new substance that will cure disease than it would to discover a super nova." On this reasoning, Joliot and Curie's find would have been barren had it not been for the Berkeley cyclotron. And, Q.E.D., "the discovery of mesotrons in cosmic rays will be of little value in the course of time unless there is developed a way of producing them, and learning of their manifold properties—ultimately to be put in the service of mankind."^[22]

The invocation of mesotrons and the hint that the projected cyclotron might make them came to the fore only after the University of Texas had set going a mechanism that would provide more money than Lawrence thought possible. He and Sproul turned, indeed spun, to one prospective donor or influential intermediary after another. For a time Walcott, the former senator with the leukemic son and a trustee of the Carnegie Institution, looked like an especially valuable contact. Walcott had contacts in big steel; funding would be easy, Lawrence said, if the steel were donated. The son, a physician, came to Berkeley to work with, and receive radiophosphorus from, John Lawrence. A very strong affection developed between the Lawrences and Cooksey and the Walcotts; but it did not bring steel for nothing or save Walcott's son.^[23] Other possibilities: Lewis Strauss, proposed by Oppenheimer and approached through Coolidge; Spencer Penrose, the dying benefactor of the Penrose Foundation, approached through Frank Jewett of Bell Labs; Edsel Ford and General Electric, approached through Dave Morris.^[24]

To his own considerable surprise, Weaver turned out to be the route to the pot of gold. We know his attitude on Rockefeller Foundation support of research cyclotrons. During the negotiations over Paxton and Laslett's foreign missions, he had formed the notion that Lawrence was "a happy-go-lucky sort of individual," a good scientist, but indecisive and not overly solicitous about the inconvenience his changes of plan caused others.^[25] And in his dealings with Lawrence in the spring of 1939, Weaver had not been pleased by the escalation of the Laboratory's request between discussion and submission.^[26] It is doubtful that he

received with much enthusiasm the news that Lawrence was coming East to look for donors of the $750,000 he reckoned as the amount yet to be raised for an instrument of 1,500 to 2,000 tons to crack the region above 100 MeV. The $750,000 arose by subtraction of the $250,000 Sproul promised to raise from the million that Lawrence, who liked round numbers, thought necessary. On the advice of Poillon, who judged that a request for a cool million would put off donors, Lawrence set the total at a lukewarm $900,000 and the balance at $650,000. This was the amount Morris requested of Edsel Ford, with an overheated inducement: "As this is an instrument which will enlarge the frontier of science almost beyond belief it should be something epoch-making and will link the names of those connected with it alongside of Newton and Einstein."^[27]

The justification for this instrument, as outlined to Sproul early in October, when it had grown to 2,000 tons, had no more substance than the rationale Morris offered Ford. There was a more definite and practical reason, however. The success of the cyclotron had inspired competitors, including two clones of the 60-inch; if the Laboratory wished to stay ahead, it must cross the new frontier, where, as cosmic ray studies indicated, "strikingly new and important things" were to be found. Sproul wanted to keep Berkeley ahead. He promised (so Lawrence relayed to Weaver) not only to raise part of the capital outlay but also to finance the operation of the he-man machine. Still, Weaver did not expect that his trustees would take much interest in the proposal, or in any costly esoteric project, in the state of the world in the fall of 1939. Here Lawrence guessed more accurately than Weaver. "I personally am banking on the trustees' taking the view that it is in just such times as these that the Rockefeller Foundation should undertake such important projects, thereby demonstrating a stability and confidence in the progress of civilization."^[28]

Lawrence opened negotiations with the Rockefeller Foundation in New York on October 27. Weaver accepted the desirability of

a cyclotron that endowed particles with 100 or 200 million electron volts; he encouraged Lawrence to think big, to beware of "initial presentation [of the project] on too small a scale;" and he insisted that the plan make clear that the cyclotron would be a national, even international, facility, "located at the University of California . . . [but] built for all science." Weaver assimilated Lawrence's project to what he called the Foundation's "national laboratory," the 200-inch telescope and its facilities abuilding on Mount Palomar; and he estimated its costs correspondingly, at $1.5 million including operating expenses for a decade.^[29]

The announcement on November 9 that Lawrence had received the Nobel prize for physics in 1939 (about which we shall say much more in a moment) strengthened Weaver's commitment to the Palomar of the vanishing small. With the ardor that the higher administration of the Foundation had once censored as excessive, he celebrated Lawrence's prize in a confidential bulletin sent to the Rockefeller trustees and invited the prize winner to put forth a detailed plan for presentation to the next trustees' meeting, in April 1940, a plan so complete that it would kill any fear that similar or competing requests would arise.^[30] "This is the sort of thing which should be done superbly—or not at all. And done superbly it is of compelling attractiveness." Lawrence responded that it should be superb, and raised the weight of the magnet to 3,000 tons, or perhaps (indecisively or flexibly) a little more, and he promised to have full plans for a 180-inch and a 205-inch cyclotron ready for discussion with Weaver in Berkeley in January. Lawrence naturally favored the larger version, as offering a chance of delivering 400 MeV alpha particles.^[31]

When Weaver arrived on January 7, he was hit with a plan for a magnet weighing over 4,000 tons. He had come with Lawrence's estimate of $750,000 in mind and the notion that it,

and perhaps as much again in operating expenses and auxiliary equipment, could be raised in equal shares by the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of California, and industry. "The size to which I found the project had grown, when I arrived at Berkeley [in January]," Weaver sighed, "carried me so far beyond any figures which I had ever discussed." Lawrence wanted $1.5 million of an estimated $2 million from the Foundation. In Lawrence's upbeat report to Poillon, Weaver did not "seem to be unduly distressed . . . [and] went away far more eager to consummate the project than when he came." Weaver had fallen under the spell of the California sunshine man and of the 60-inch cyclotron, then treating cancer patients and, on demand, charring plywood with a directed energy beam of deuterons released into the air. Weaver suggested to Sproul "the bare possibility" that the Foundation might give as much as a million dollars.^[32] Back in the cold East, Weaver discovered that the Foundation's president, Raymond Fosdick, who had been enthusiastic about the project in December, had lost his conviction, and doubted that the trustees would give even $500,000. The January plan was dead. Or so Weaver wrote Sproul, whose recent appointment as a Rockefeller trustee closed the funding loop. "It does not seem to me a desperately serious matter if this project is delayed somewhat. Professor Lawrence is fortunately still young, there is a great deal of rich experience which can be gained with the 60-inch cyclotron, and there is a negligible danger that anyone else will run away with the ball."^[33] This was to ignore Texas, still out in left field awaiting its fly, and Lawrence's flexibility.

During January and early February, friends of the Laboratory brought pressure on Fosdick and their acquaintances among the Rockefeller trustees. Among the friends were old supporters like Poillon, who hoped, perhaps, that something might be realized at last from the Research Corporation's cyclotron patents; Karl Compton, a Foundation trustee; former ambassador Morris, of the

Macy Foundation; and Alfred L. Loomis, who spent the riches he amassed as an investment banker on a private laboratory and the encouragement of physical research. An expert instrument designer himself, Loomis was much taken with the Laboratory on his first visit there late in 1939; his wide influence among officials of corporations and foundations made his support of the project, which he pledged in December, a most valuable acquisition.^[34]

Weaver also made a play among the trustees. He pointed out to Karl Compton the happy parallel between Lawrence's project and the 200-inch telescope. "Such a cyclotron would, I think, be correctly and generally viewed as the definitive instrument for the investigation of the nucleus—the infinitesimally small—just as the 200" telescope is viewed as the definitive instrument for the investigation of the universe—the infinitely great." Compton visited the Laboratory and returned "radiant over all the wonderful things he saw in Berkeley" and convinced that the new machine "should be built adequately large to reach the range of energy above 160 million volts in order to attack the problem of mesotron forces."^[35] After a visit from Weaver, another Foundation trustee, George Whipple, a frequent recipient of hot iron from Berkeley, declared himself keen on the project, and certain that funds would be forthcoming from somewhere; he spoke "with an enthusiasm which is very unusual for him concerning Lawrence and his group, saying that the way they do things out there is 'just right.'"^[36]

Weaver also collected professional evaluations. He asked Bohr, Bush, both Comptons, W.D. Coolidge, Jewett, Joliot, and Oliphant whether "expert opinion of the world of science is reasonably unanimous in viewing [the giant cyclotron] as one of the most interesting, the most potentially important, and the most promising projects in the whole present field of natural science."

The replies might have made Lawrence blush. Bohr: "It would be greeted with utmost pleasure by all physicists." Bush: "This opportunity is the most interesting, the most potentially important, the most promising project of large magnitude in the whole field of natural science." A.H. Compton: "If anyone can make a success of a 2000-ton cyclotron, Lawrence can. . . . On the whole, the investment would be a nice one." K.T. Compton: "I would definitely place it in the number one position by a large margin." Coolidge: "Now is the time to do it while the exceptional combination of enthusiasm, intelligence, experience and skill of Dr. Lawrence and his group are available." Jewett: "[Its] value . . . is of course beyond question." Joliot: "The realization of such an apparatus is likely to bring important results. . . . Lawrence is, without any doubt, the most qualified man to undertake its construction." Oliphant: "It is essential that the construction of the cyclotron should be carried to the limit by Professor Lawrence."^[37]

All this lobbying cancelled Fosdick's timidity. At a meeting in mid February, which Poillon attended, "the Rockefeller [administrative] group distinctly favor[ed] the larger [cyclotron] because of the certainty of its performance within and above the 160,000,000-volt range."^[38] The 160 MeV referred to one of several designs that Lawrence had supplied when he realized there was no chance of $1.5 million from the Foundation. The 205-inch, perhaps so chosen to beat Palomar, fell to 184 inches, the largest size of commercially available steel plate. And the 150-inch stayed in the running. On February 20, 1940, Lawrence provided Weaver with four options: (a) 184 inches, $1.5 million, handsomely housed and fully equipped, operating at 2,500 kW to kick ions to 200 MeV before relativity could take its toll, the "conservatively ideal in exploiting the limit of the cyclotron method;" (b) 184 inches, $1 million, cheaply housed and partially equipped, operating at 700 kW and perhaps yielding 100 MeV deuterons, easily stepped up to (a); (c) 184 inches, $875,000, a skeleton, deficient in copper and steel, producing 75 MeV

deuterons, capable of upgrading to (a); and (d) 150 inches, $750,000, able to reach 100 MeV with an oscillator more powerful than (c)'s, but not easily refashioned into (a). Lawrence took his stand between the most desirable and the least expensive: "It seems to me that attention should be concentrated on projects 'b' or 'c', of course very much preferably 'b'." The 160 MeV probably referred to option (b) and alpha particles, since, with his ear for audience, Lawrence had advised Weaver to couch his statements in terms of alpha energies, which are twice those of deuterons for the same cyclotron parameters and somewhat less afflicted by relativistic mass increase.^[39]

The fundamental alternative—184 inches versus 150 inches—represented a hedged bet. On the one hand, option (a) and its upgradable lower forms would quite possibly be able to materialize mesotrons. DuBridge and Karl Compton emphasized the desirability of building the machine that, as Compton put it, allowed a "reasonable expectation of producing mesotrons." The reasonableness depended on estimates of the mesotron's mass. Karl Compton thought 160 MeV might do; DuBridge, "energies of the order of 100 million electron volts."^[40] Oppenheimer and Fermi, who happened to be in Berkeley, put the mass of the mesotron between 70 and 120 MeV, gave it a 90 percent chance of falling under 100 MeV, and advised that the higher the bombarding energy—the closer to option (a), "which exploits the full practical potentialities of the cyclotron method"—the greater the chance of making mesotrons in the cyclotron.^[41] Lawrence rated the materialization of mesotrons "the most fundamental experimental problem that one can formulate at the present time," and thought he could succeed with 150 MeV. But he did not promise. Although mesotrons might fail to materialize, the energy region above 100 MeV was nonetheless certain to be rich: "we cannot help but entertain the possibility of nuclear chain reactions by starting

them off with sufficiently energetic particles and that maybe a hundred million volt particles will do the trick. . . . Should this prove to be true, we will have a discovery of great immediate practical importance. On the one hand, we will have a practical philosopher's stone transmuting elements on a large scale; and, as a corollary thereto, we will have tapped, on a practical scale, a vast store of nuclear energy."^[42]

Despite these formidable arguments, Lawrence retained option (d). He thus deprived the trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation of the option of arguing that if they could not put up enough for mesotrons, they should put up nothing at all. Lawrence had opened his mind on the matter to Weaver during a telephone conversation at the end of January: "The point is that it is far more important to get into the new territory now. We would rather build a, say, haywire outfit and actually have been up there than to take a chance on going up later and maybe not getting there at all." Occasionally he thought to go for the 150-inch and not risk its loss by groping for mesotrons, and he so advised Weaver by telegram. As he explained his position to Poillon, who had heard similar arguments from him before, the most important thing was "to accomplish the original and primary objective of attacking the energy range in the atom above one hundred million volts. . . . We will be in entirely new territory. . . . It is distinctly of secondary importance that we get a little further in by going 50% higher."^[43] As in the old days, Lawrence set goals expressible not in terms of progress in physics, but in terms of increase in decimals.

Weaver decided to take two options before the trustees in April: $750,000 for the 150-inch; or $1 million toward the 184-inch, on condition that the University raise at least another $250,000 for it. In either case, the University would have to provide operating costs for a decade.^[44] Sproul had already obtained authorization from the Board of Regents for the $250,000 he had promised for construction and either $50,000 or $85,000 a year for maintenance of the smaller or larger machine respectively. Sproul

regarded the commitment of such sums by the regents to such a purpose as "pretty overwhelming."^[45] It remained only to await the decision of the trustees. They reviewed the opinions of the physicist and engineering consultants from Bush to Oliphant. They had a lesson in nuclear physics and its applications from Karl Compton, who had been coached in Berkeley (plate 10.1), and from Weaver, who drew on inspirational photographs of the Laboratory and its machines supplied by Cooksey. And they heard a heady peroration from their program officer. Weaver compared Lawrence's Laboratory with Bohr's institute; he recommended that the Foundation support the 184-inch project, as an "opportunity to make discontinuous change in [the] rate of progress of science;" and he extolled the "shrewd intelligence, imagination and insight, unselfishness, inspiration for young men, [and the] charm" of the man who would carry the project through.^[46] And there would be no trouble carrying it through, as the trustees learned from Jewett, now speaking as head of the National Academy of Sciences: "a matter of engineering calculation [he said] and not one of uncertain speculation."^[47]

As a further aid to their deliberations, the Rockefeller trustees felt heavy pressure transmitted through their officers from Lawrence's agents and admirers Poillon and Morris. They were not content with the prospect of a million dollars. "I am making life miserable for Warren Weaver and Raymond Fosdick," Morris had written Lawrence at the end of February. "Confidentially, we are all striving for the million dollar cyclotron under column B, and Howard [Poillon] and I are trying to jack up this limit 12 and one half percent. I really feel that all four of us are working for

you heart and soul."^[48] The quartet missed its pitch by 2.5 percent.

At noon on April 3, 1940, Weaver called Lawrence to announce that the trustees had come down 15 percent above the expected maximum.^[49]

WW: Our trustees voted $1,150,000 . . .

EL: Really, Warren, $1,150,000 . . .

WW: And with the $250,000 that makes $1,400,000, which you see is the full original budget.

EL: The full original budget. . . . Its hard to tell you how I feel. This is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened. . . . I'm coming to New York, and it will give me a chance really to explain my feelings to you. This is the most wonderful thing that one can think of in the world.

Lawrence had the feeling he was "walking on air." So did his successful agents Morris and Poillon. "You can scarcely overestimate the joyous feeling that resulted from the news," Poillon said, and indeed he had earned the right many times over to share in this tribute to the machine and Laboratory he had backed from the beginning. The munificent grant represented many things: dollars, to be sure, but also the affection, respect, and confidence in which Lawrence's fellow physicists and prominent men of business held him. As Dave Morris wrote: "This really great triumph should mean much to you in more ways than one. There was no disagreement anywhere along the whole line. Great and small, technical and lay, they all backed the PLAN and YOU. Do get full emotional satisfaction from such rare unanimity: you deserve it."^[50] According to the formal agreement, the Rockefeller Foundation and the University would put up money as Lawrence needed it in the proportion of 23:5 until June 30, 1944, when, barring "unforeseen difficulties," the machine was to have been completed.^[51]

The University immediately obtained a fifth of its commitment of $250,000 from the Research Corporation. Lawrence asked the Markle Foundation for the balance, toward which it gave $50,000 at Weaver's urging, and tried to get Westinghouse to underbid General Electric's generous offer to make the 184-inch's power supply at cost, which Westinghouse declined to do. He spent two weeks touring Wall Street with Loomis, asking for help in knocking down the price of steel and other material and equipment. Despite the pressure of war orders, which left little incentive for price concessions, Loomis and Lawrence did very well on Wall Street. The balance of the University's share of the capital costs eventually came from the federal government, in consequence of those unforeseen but foreseeable difficulties that prevented completion of the machine before June 1944. And the war also made good the shortfall in Lawrence's ideas of eluding relativity; the machine when finished in 1946 operated on a principle invented by McMillan in 1945, perhaps as a result of his wartime experience with radar.^[52]

In a public explanation of the gift, and before the unforeseen difficulties interrupted the building of the 184-inch cyclotron, Fosdick wrote: "With so much creative human talent employed in devising increasingly powerful engines of destruction it is at least some comfort to know that today in the United States work is proceeding on two of the mightiest instruments the world has ever seen for the peaceful exploration of the Universe." The 200-inch telescope and the 184-inch cyclotron would respectively open up the infinitely great and the infinitely small, alleviating "the insatiable curiosity which is the mark of civilized man." To be sure, the cyclotron would do something practical: it would produce specialized radioactive isotopes, perhaps beams of therapeutic value, perhaps even clues to the exploitation of atomic energy. But above all, "like the 200-inch telescope, it is a mighty symbol, a token of man's hunger for knowledge, an emblem of the undiscourageable search for truth which is the noblest expression

of the human spirit."^[53] This inspired gloss, which was not entirely disingenuous, marks the end of the era of private support for Lawrence's Laboratory.