Earnest Orlando Lawrence

15 August 2001

Display high resolution version

A century ago Ernest Orlando Lawrence, one of the great pioneers of particle accelerators, was born on 8 August 1901. He died almost exactly 57 years later on 27 August 1958. Lawrence invented the concept of the circular particle accelerator in 1929 after reading Rolf Wideroe's account of acceleration in a linear device. By January 1931, together with his student Stanley Livingston, he had built his first successful cyclotron - a device only 5 inches in diameter that reached 80,000 electron volts (80 keV). And in August that year, the University of California gave him the former Civil Engineering Test Facility on the Berkeley campus to house a huge magnet he had aquired to convert for use in a much bigger cyclotron. The old "Radiation Laboratory" was the origin of what is now the large laboratory that bears Lawrence's name - the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 1939, Lawrence was awarded the Nobel prize for his invention and development of the cyclotron.

Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Publications

Please contact person or institution named for information about permission for public or commercial use.