There would be no more trophies to hang on the wall. In the otherwise relativistic world of cyclotron physics, one linear relationship ruled: an almost direct correlation between input and output. Higher energies required proportionately larger and more powerful vacuum pumps and electromagnets. The magnet for the 11-inch cyclotron had weighed 2 tons. For the 27-inch, Lawrence already had his eye on an 80-ton magnet, originally built for a Bay Area firm, the Federal Telegraph Company, but now obsolete and rusting away in a Palo Alto junkyard.8
Bigger machines and an expanding empire also required more room. Lawrence installed the 27-inch in an old wooden building on campus known as the Civil Engineering Testing Laboratory; the forestry and linguistic departments still maintained offices upstairs. He christened the structure, somewhat grandiosely, the “Penetrating Radiations Laboratory,” a title later shortened to “Radiation Laboratory.” For the growing number of grad students gathering around him, however, it was simply the “Rad Lab,” just as their remarkable young phenom of a professor was “EOL.”9
* * *
By sheer force of personality more than by any power of intellect, Lawrence was a commanding presence at Berkeley by the early 1930s. Although tall and good-looking—he was over six feet, with startlingly blue eyes and a shock of blond hair combed straight back—Lawrence spoke in a tenor rather than a baritone and was never comfortable addressing large groups.
Ernest was born of Norwegian immigrants at the start of the new century. His father, Carl, was school superintendent and later president of a teachers college in Canton, South Dakota. Ernest’s mother, Gunda, recalled an early childhood spent in a sod hut on the prairie. Educated at St. Olaf College and the University of South Dakota, Ernest developed values that were decidedly, even determinedly, midwestern.
Yet Lawrence’s plebeian background had not yielded egalitarian beliefs. Primus inter pares would never be a familiar concept at the Rad Lab. To the cyclotroneers, EOL was “the Maestro” or simply “Boss.” Visitors to the lab noticed a single gleaming china teacup and saucer amid the workers’ grimy porcelain mugs. Following the morning coffee break, Cooksey locked the cup and saucer as well as a silver-plated spoon in a drawer conspicuously marked “Reserved for the Director.”10
Like a medieval lord, Lawrence presided over weekly meetings of the physics department’s Journal Club—convened promptly at 7:30 every Monday evening in LeConte’s library—from a massive red leather chair reserved for him alone. It was the one time that the cyclotron was turned off. Ernest introduced the presenter, usually asked the first question, and brought the proceedings to an abrupt close exactly ninety minutes later with the first ring of the campanile’s chimes, even if it meant interrupting the speaker in midsentence.11
Colleagues from eastern schools found Lawrence’s informal manner popular with students, if somewhat disconcerting. Physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, visiting from Princeton, was dismayed by one of Ernest’s typically boisterous pep talks: “This seemed to me a rather inappropriate talk to a group of graduate students presumably of some sophistication. I found, however, not only that this was the tone of the talk which depressed me somewhat but it seemed to work, which depressed me even more.”12
Ernest’s strict Lutheran upbringing meant that frustrations and setbacks at the cyclotron seldom provoked expletives stronger than “Fudge!” or “Oh, Sugar!” But Lawrence, for all his Scandinavian stolidness, had a quick and livid temper. When it flared, a vein stood out above his left temple—a kind of weather gauge and warning to students and colleagues alike.
Disdainful of most human frailties, Lawrence had a particular intolerance for lying. Once, after berating Molly for not listening to an interview he had given on the radio, Lawrence was brought up short by her reply: “Ernest, would you rather I lied?”13
The anodyne to Lawrence’s withering temper was his charm, equally celebrated and just as quick to surface. When Northwestern University had tried to lure him from Berkeley, Sproul joined with the head of the physics department, Raymond Birge, to thwart the attempt. As ammunition to persuade the regents to promote Lawrence to full professor, Birge and Ernest’s colleagues wrote a long letter to Sproul. In it, Lawrence’s affability and winning personality were given almost as much prominence as his research.14
Possessed of energy and enthusiasm in seemingly equal measure, Lawrence terrorized the Rad Lab’s cyclotroneers—whom he affectionately called “the boys”—when at the controls of the machine. In those early days, starting the cyclotron involved closing a knife-switch. This simple act, noted one of the boys, was sometimes accompanied by an “ensuing sparking, crash, and blowing out of lights,” plunging the campus and even adjacent neighborhoods into sudden darkness.15
Once the cyclotron was running, Lawrence always tried to coax the maximum voltage out of the machine. A penciled mark next to a slide-switch in the control room indicated the pinnacle reached on the last attempt. Success was measured by the intensity and focus of the ionized particle beam, which emerged into the target chamber as a thin line of bright blue light. These sessions, usually brief, ended when an oscillator tube burned out or the cyclotron’s vacuum chamber sprung a leak—whereupon Ernest cheerfully promised to return when the boys had the problem fixed.
Hazards abounded. The popular method of locating vacuum leaks—by playing a jet of natural gas over the sealing wax—was likened by the boys to a race between explosion and asphyxiation. The cyclotron bathed its operators in so much radio frequency energy that it inspired a favorite trick: standing next to the machine, a cyclotroneer could get a lightbulb to flicker in one hand by holding onto a grounded piece of metal with the other.
Frequent electrical faults caused heavy hooks to fall from overhead cages, shorting out the cyclotron with a resounding bang and an overpowering smell of ozone. Water spraying from the cooling system that Cooksey installed—common garden hose, for the most
