As Lawrence was aware, the race was no longer only with the Axis. Berkeley’s immediate rival was not Germany but Princeton; his challenger the former student he had fired twice from the Rad Lab.
* * *
Robert Wilson was a twenty-one-year-old experimentalist from Frontier, Wyoming, whom Ernest had dismissed the first time for losing a rubber seal in the 37-inch. Since the seal prevented the machine from running on the very day that John had scheduled a demonstration of his neutron-ray therapy to a prospective funder, both brothers had flown into a rage.26 Rehired at Alvarez’s instigation, Wilson had later been fired a second time for melting a pair of pliers while welding a probe onto the cyclotron vacuum tank.27 Offered his job back again, Wilson not surprisingly decided instead to accept an offer from Princeton, where Henry Smyth was exploring a different approach to electromagnetic separation.
Smyth’s project, subsequently taken over by Wilson, had by early 1941 produced a device dubbed the “Isotron,” which used an electrical rather than a magnetic field to separate uranium.28 Wilson began to suspect that the reason why Lawrence stopped by Princeton on his way home from Washington was not only to check on his rival’s progress but to lure workers away to the Rad Lab.29
* * *
Once the decision to proceed with the bomb had been made, a location for the project had to be found. The leading candidates were Columbia, Princeton, Chicago, and Berkeley. Ernest, of course, remained a strong advocate for the Rad Lab. Operation of the 37-inch spectrograph was steadily improving, and the 60-inch was still the world’s only source of element 94. Moreover, one practical consideration dominated all: there was no possibility of moving the massive machines.30
Another compelling argument for Berkeley was Oppenheimer. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Compton had asked Oppie to take over the theoretical calculations on bomb physics from Gregory Breit.31
Despite Ernest’s earlier promise to Bush and Conant, approaching year’s end the Rad Lab had produced a mere 25 micrograms of uranium metal, enriched to barely 3 percent U-235.32 Lawrence was nonetheless in a triumphant mood by Christmas Eve, when the regents approved his plan to convert the 184-inch into a uranium separator.33 His race with Princeton remained neck and neck. That day, when Smyth cabled Lawrence with the latest results from the Isotron, Ernest’s competitive spirit overruled the holiday mood in his reply: “Three cheers. How about lower temperatures? Merry Christmas.”34 On New Year’s Day, Lawrence wrote to Smyth suggesting that he and Wilson consider shifting their workers to Berkeley—“since you are having difficulties recruiting there.”35
A week later, Lawrence was once again on his way east by train, this time in the company of Alvarez and Alfred Loomis. Compton had declared the project’s deadlines: January 1943 to achieve the first self-sustaining atomic chain reaction; January 1944 to extract the first samples of element 94 from an atomic reactor; January 1945 for a bomb.36
From New York, Lawrence and Alvarez took the train to Chicago, where they found Compton at home, sick with the flu. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Ernest presented the case for moving the entire bomb project to Berkeley. Compton had recently decided upon Chicago as the most practical site.37
Lawrence challenged the decision, declaring that, compared to Berkeley, the “tempo of the University of Chicago” was too slow.38 Bristling, Compton countered that he would have an atomic chain reaction going by the end of the year. “I’ll bet you a thousand dollars you won’t,” replied Lawrence with some heat.
When tempers cooled, Ernest dropped the stakes to a nickel cigar.39 His wager aside, Lawrence remained unwilling to accept that Berkeley had lost out to Chicago. In a telegram, he notified Conant that Compton’s choice was “acceptable only as temporary arrangement.”40
Within six weeks, however, there was an entirely new enterprise on the Chicago campus, the Metallurgical Laboratory, which would oversee research into the atomic chain reaction. Work already under way at Columbia, where Fermi had been designing a so-called atomic pile to produce element 94, was unceremoniously moved to the Windy City. Lawrence consented, reluctantly, to lend Seaborg and Segrè to the new “Met Lab.” Seaborg, a codiscoverer of the mysterious element, had meanwhile decided to call it plutonium.41 If Ernest’s uranium enrichment plans failed, plutonium still offered a promising candidate for the bomb. But wartime secrecy would keep it off the periodic chart.42
* * *
At Berkeley, the war had brought a halt to normal academic routine. Called upon to carry out chemical warfare experiments for the army, Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben released small quantities of isotope-tagged gas on Marin County beaches late at night. Ruben’s adviser, chemist Kenneth Pitzer, had already left for Washington, where he led an OSRD-funded project—headquartered at the Congressional Country Club—to develop secret weapons for Allied spies and saboteurs.43
At the Donner Laboratory, the exigencies of war had literally crowded out the healing arts.44 The brand-new third floor, added to the lab to accommodate John’s radiophosphorous clinic, was commandeered by Ernest for the bomb project before the first patient arrived.45
By mid-January 1942, the winding of the upper core of the magnet for the 184-inch was completed. A week later, the final shipment of copper arrived. Lawrence’s latest plan—approved by Sproul—was to fit a number of individual mass spectrographs between the poles of the giant magnet. Originally, the magnet was not expected to be finished until November. After Lawrence obtained emergency funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, however, work was begun around the clock; the completion date was moved up to spring.
Yet even as conversion of the 184-inch proceeded at a breakneck pace, the feasibility of electromagnetic separation remained unproven on an industrial scale. One recent arrival at the Rad Lab was surprised to hear Lawrence shout with joy after a particular
