Ernest Lawrence

Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born on 8 August 1901 at Canton, South Dakota, the son of Norwegian immigrants. He received his B.A. in chemistry from the University of South Dakota in 1922, an M.A. from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1925, and in 1928 became associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was professor from 1930 and director of the Radiation Laboratory from 1936. In 1929 he invented the cyclotron, a device for accelerating nuclear particles to very high velocities without the use of high voltages. The fast particles were used to bombard atoms of various elements, forming new elements, and hundreds of radioactive isotopes were discovered. He also invented a method for obtaining time intervals as small as three billionths of a second. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 and died on 27 August 1958 at Palo Alto, California.