Big Science Page 17
Not only were Molly’s feelings now evident, but Oppenheimer’s relentless campaigning against Harvard also had found its mark. Ernest finally yielded. Even before all Berkeley’s commitments and promises were formally ironed out, he tendered his regrets to Conant. “The most attractive factor in your offer is the assurance of continued support in my research work, with the prospect of being able to do things at Harvard presumably out of the question here,” he wrote. “But it now develops that the university administration here is glad to establish the Radiation Laboratory as a permanent university activity . . . From the standpoint of furthering our research program, therefore, it is clear that I should not make a change at this time, as it would involve serious delays in rebuilding the laboratory.”
The Harvard affair permanently altered Lawrence’s relationship with the University of California. There would be other offers, including a lavish proposition from the University of Texas. But Berkeley would never again face the risk of losing Ernest Lawrence. Their two names would remain entwined for the rest of Lawrence’s life, with more atom smashers—and many more achievements—still to come.
• • •
The expense of fending off Harvard awakened the University of California regents to the presence of a prodigy on their payroll. No member was more intrigued than John Francis Neylan, a San Francisco attorney whose career in public service would trace a forty-year arc from liberal to reactionary: starting as an advisor to California’s progressive governor Hiram Johnson, continuing as chief counsel to the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and concluding as fire-breathing anticommunist determined to root out “Reds” from the Berkeley faculty. Neylan had been a regent for nearly a decade when the Harvard offer piqued his curiosity and brought him to the door of the Rad Lab.
“It was like a secondhand tin shop, a dinky little place over there on the campus,” he recalled years later. He entered, met the implausibly youthful Professor Lawrence, “then I was introduced to Dr. So-and-So from Cornell and Dr. So-and-So from this place and Dr. So-and-So from that place . . . I was flabbergasted. There weren’t two in the place that had to shave twice a week. They were just a bunch of children.” Ernest, guilelessly playing host, sat Jack Neylan in front of a blackboard and attempted to explain the cyclotron principle to him. “Of course,” Neylan recounted, “after the first minute and a half, he was so far out beyond me that I didn’t know where he was going.”
Ernest spun a grandiose vision of how science being done right there on the Berkeley campus would change human lives, not just through advances in physics but in the fields of health and medicine. Jack Neylan felt a bond being forged. A few days later, he dragged the most eminent regent, a seventy-one-year-old San Francisco lawyer named Garrett McEnerney, over to the Rad Lab. Neylan stood by as Lawrence weaved his spell over this sophisticated gentleman, who had socialized with governors and presidents. “McEnerney had a wonderful talk with Ernest,” Neylan recalled. “When we walked out, he said, ‘How much of that did you follow?’ I said, ‘He lost me first time around the track.’ ”
For the next three decades, Jack Neylan would serve as Ernest’s patron, mentor, and guide in the ways of the high and mighty. “Neylan kind of considered Ernest as a sort of protégé,” Molly would recall. “He was going to look after him, see that he got taken care of, and got what he needed for his work . . . He was going to teach him how to do the best for himself.” In the process, Neylan’s political coloration rubbed off on Ernest, too. Years later, when Neylan provoked a confrontation with the Berkeley faculty by implementing an anticommunist loyalty oath, Ernest Lawrence—then at the peak of his influence on campus—was one of the few professors who refused to speak out against it. And Neylan’s visceral disdain for Robert Oppenheimer—“so conceited that he just shoved God over”—may well have contributed to the bitter break between Lawrence and Oppenheimer that soured their last years.
• • •
The lanky Luis Alvarez returned to the Rad Lab full-time as a postdoctoral fellow in May 1936, finding to his satisfaction that the informality that so impressed him during his visit the previous year still reigned. Lawrence and Cooksey were both out of town, so the graduate student answering Alvarez’s ring at the front door of the old wooden hulk brought him over to Jack Livingood. “When can you begin work?” Livingood asked. Alvarez replied: “As soon as I get my coat off.”
He detected a few changes in the floor plan since his last visit. The control console had been relocated in accordance with John Lawrence’s instructions, though it was now jammed in a crowded room between Cooksey’s workbench and a drafting table. The cyclotron room was still dominated by the big yoke-shaped magnet, but the old vacuum chamber with its encrustations of red sealing wax had been replaced by an improved vacuum tank known, in deference to its designer, as “Cooksey’s can.”
Around the back was another laboratory space, which was to be Alvarez’s research home. Upon entering, he was physically staggered by a powerful stench emanating from John Lawrence’s mouse cages. In the room, a female graduate student evidently immune to the smell sat working on a spectrograph, an instrument for measuring electromagnetic radiation. When Alvarez asked her how she could stand the fumes, she assured him cheerfully that one grew used to them, advice he accepted dubiously at the moment but soon discovered to be true. More persistent was the sharp smell of the circulating oil that cooled the big magnet and its electrical transformers. One of the transformers was in need of repair, which Livingood assigned Alvarez as his inaugural task. Returning home at lunchtime that day, his clothing soaked in warm, dripping oil, Alvarez presented his wife, Gerry, with her first eye-watering dose of the fumes “that would signal my whereabouts for years to come,” he recalled.
By the time Lawrence returned from an East Coast fund-raising trip, Alvarez had become tolerably acclimated to the smells and to the lab’s other quirky phenomena, including its miasma of radio-frequency interference—so potent that one could touch the metal base of a light bulb to any exposed electric conduit in the lab and make it glow (a parlor trick frequently employed by staff members to impress their visitors). The boss greeted his new recruit with the news that he had secured $70,000 in funding for the new sixty-inch cyclotron, and that Alvarez’s role would be to design its magnet. “I pleaded ignorance of all things magnetic,” Alvarez recalled, “to which Ernest characteristically replied, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll learn.’ ”
Alvarez was fortunate to have joined the Rad Lab just as the cyclotron was evolving into a machine reliable enough to meet Ernest’s expectations consistently. Through 1935, the twenty-seven-inch had exhibited a persistent tetchiness that kept grad students and technicians busy troubleshooting in its innards for hours on end. A string of especially perplexing breakdowns had bedeviled the lab that year, at a time when Lawrence was struggling to fill a mounting stack of orders for radioisotopes from all over the country. To Merle Tuve he had lamented an “epidemic of trouble, connected with raising the power output.” He allowed his innate optimism to shine through, however, promising Tuve that “it will not be long now before we will have this trouble licked and will be able to go ahead satisfactorily.” He was correct. Less than three weeks later, the electrical flaw causing the breakdowns was identified and fixed.
But other problems persisted. In mid-October Lawrence guaranteed Poillon that there would be a steady supply of radio-sodium coming out of the lab—eventually. At the moment, however, “our apparatus runs only spasmodically, and a good share of the time we have it dismantled for repairs and alterations.” He balanced his “too dark” assessment with a typical assurance that “there can no longer be any doubt but that ultimately the apparatus will produce really enormous amounts of radioactive substances.” He concluded the letter with the audacious observation that “the apparatus is now almost to the engineering stage of development: that is, we are about at the point now where further desired improvements are of a primarily engineering character, which will mak
e the apparatus thoroughly reliable and practically effective.” The words must have elicited from Poillon a knowing, if wry, smile; in the midst of his travails, Lawrence was looking ahead to the time when the cyclotron’s inconstancy would be merely a quaint memory. Poillon likely understood that the moment was not nearly as close at hand as Lawrence claimed, but was not necessarily too far off, either. Lawrence was given to extravagant predictions of this sort; if he had not consistently delivered on them, no one would believe him.
Indeed, the year 1936 introduced a string of technical improvements yielding higher energies, higher currents, and unprecedented reliability. This started with the replacement of the machine’s timeworn old vacuum tank with Cooksey’s new version. The Cooksey can, which was the key to a near doubling of energy to 6 million volts, worked almost flawlessly from the moment of its installation. The new tank changed the cyclotron’s reputation from a device whose efficient management was something of a black art, toward one that could be operated predictably under almost any condition.
Following the installation of Cooksey’s chamber, the next project was to bring the beam out of the vacuum tank and into the open air. The goal was to liberate the beam from the interference of the machine’s powerful magnetic and electrical fields—“one of the formerly objectionable features of the cyclotron,” as two visiting researchers from the University of Illinois put it. The Rad Lab called the process “snouting,” after the pig-snout shape of the tube that was to carry the beam from the vacuum chamber and out into the air. The design involved applying an electrical force to the ions on their final circuit around the vacuum tank to bend their path toward the tank wall, which they would penetrate via a platinum “window” one ten-thousandth of an inch thick. The resulting effect was striking: a bright streak ten inches long, glowing lavender from its interaction with nitrogen ions in the atmosphere. The beam not only facilitated more sophisticated experiments but also provided a new “vaudeville” for Lawrence to exploit, for it never failed to elicit gasps of astonishment from his visitors.
The most important upgrade took place during the summer of 1937, when Lawrence achieved a four-year-old goal of expanding the magnet poles to thirty-seven inches, accommodating a larger vacuum tank designed by Cooksey and allowing a step up in maximum energies to 10 million volts. The old tank was shipped to Yale, where it would become the core of the new cyclotron. On July 8 Cooksey’s new “can” was maneuvered into the lab by block and tackle anchored by his treasured new Packard, a yellow sedan he dubbed the “Creamliner.” Three weeks later, the now thirty-seven-inch cyclotron gave birth to a powerful beam.
Cooksey’s new tank compiled everything the lab had learned about how to build a cyclotron into a rugged, gleaming, machined tank with glass insulators and arrangements for air and water cooling. In Ed McMillan’s judgment, it was the first version of the cyclotron to show “signs of professionalism, [with] nicely machined surfaces and things welded together, bolted together, and gasketed together.” For the first time, the unit also incorporated enhancements developed elsewhere than the Rad Lab. Just as Lawrence had warned Sproul that the cyclotron diaspora was bound to end Berkeley’s monopoly on cheap grad-student labor, it was now ending Berkeley’s monopoly on cyclotron technology. By mid-1937, a dozen cyclotrons were under construction or operating around the world; the flow of information and innovation had become a two-way street, with advances in ion sources, radio-frequency systems, and magnetic controls filtering back to the Berkeley cyclotron from its offspring elsewhere. The Rad Lab was not too proud to build these enhancements into its machine, where warranted. The inflow of new ideas was especially helpful because one purpose of the thirty-seven-inch was to pretest design details for the sixty-inch, which would represent such a tremendous leap in specifications that as little as possible could be left to chance.
Few of these improvements would have worked as well as they did without the ministrations of the lab’s newest employee. He was Bill Brobeck, a rusty-haired twenty-nine-year-old who wandered into the lab one day in the summer of 1937 out of sheer curiosity. Raised in Berkeley and possessed of engineering degrees from Stanford and MIT, Brobeck had thrown over a job at a local power company out of boredom and was searching for something new to occupy himself, preferably a position that would not turn him into a drone who “pushes a slide rule all day or punches a calculator.” Fortunately, he could pursue this quest at his leisure thanks to his late father, a San Francisco corporate attorney who had left his family with enough money to ride out the Crash and the Depression in comfort.
Brobeck kept up with the engineering profession through frequent visits to the Berkeley campus library. There one day he happened upon an article by Franz Kurie describing the cyclotron. Surprised to learn that the machine was located on campus a few paces from where he sat, Brobeck strolled over. In the Rad Lab, he encountered Don Cooksey hunched over the initial plans for the sixty-inch. Brobeck applied for a job; informed that the lab had no money to pay him, he explained that he was willing to work for nothing. This was enough to get him an appointment with Ernest Lawrence, who, he recalled, “was very pleased to have another person with engineering interests, because there were lots of engineering problems.” Brobeck, for his part, was taken with Ernest’s democratic approach to lab management. “The janitor was just as important a person as the Nobel scientist who came through, because he had his job to do,” he reflected. Having been educated at two of the most elite schools in the country, Brobeck found the Rad Lab’s lack of intellectual snobbery refreshing—more so because as an engineer ignorant of nuclear physics, he was bound to be the odd man out in the Radiation Laboratory.
It was obvious even to a nonphysicist such as Brobeck that “scientific knowledge was pouring in.” On one wall of the Rad Lab hung an isotope chart devised by Alvarez, with brass hooks to hold cards identifying every new isotope and listing its properties—most of them discovered in that very building. But Brobeck could not avoid casting a disparaging eye on the quality of the lab’s engineering; too many important things fell through the cracks as a result of the sharing of responsibilities for physics and machine tending, he judged. The lab really had an engineering staff of one: Don Cooksey, who was unquestionably skilled but who found it a challenge to maintain the technical standards of cyclotron design all by himself.
With his engineer’s soul, Brobeck could not help but be offended by the Rad Lab’s slapdash operation and maintenance standards. That included the building itself. The chief virtue of the old wooden shack, he judged, was that “no one objected if you drove a nail into it anywhere.” The high-voltage transformers in the courtyard also were showing their age; Brobeck appraised them as “equipment Marconi would have recognized.” As for the lab’s operational technique, he was “amazed at how haywire things were, how sloppy the work was, and how many things could be improved.” The cyclotron ran, “but it was held together with string and sealing wax, literally.”
Brobeck recognized the underlying problem as one that afflicted any factory facing relentless pressure for production: “There was a strong tendency to keep the machine running at all costs by patching and improvising to get back ‘on the air’ after a failure.” Time could not be set aside for comprehensive maintenance and repair. “They were doing physics. If they got a neutron, they were happy. It didn’t make any difference if it broke down half an hour later if they had their results. The next guy could fix it.” This approach led to frequent failures and lengthy outages, during which the staff finally would strip away the accretion of Rube Goldberg–style patches applied since the last major repair and restore the machine to full working order. As for the staff’s amusing game of illuminating light bulbs from the metal surfaces energized by the force field in the cyclotron room, to Brobeck’s horrified eye, this posed a fire risk, especially with oil flowing everywhere—often onto the floor. Such indifference to electrical hazards, he knew from experience, would not have been tolerated in any professional setting.
Brobeck assumed personal responsibility for imposing order on this freewheeling place, which had grown up with the spirit of small science and had not yet developed the professional maturity required of big-dollar research on an institutional scale. His background allowed him to see the cyclotron not as an experimental apparatus but as a machine requiring regular upkeep. Brobeck introduced such rudimentary industrial practices as preventive maintenance. His checklist for the thirty-seven-inch cyclotron would eventually encompass two dozen weekly tasks, including cleaning water filters, checking oil levels, blowing dust out of electrical equipment, and checking flywheel belts—procedures very similar, he observed, to “those used in automobile service stations,” and no less crucial. What was most important was that Brobeck’s standards went into place in time for the construction and launch of the new machine: the “Crocker Cracker,” a cyclotron so immense that, as the cyclotroneer Stan Van Voorhis recalled, the first photographs showing its scale had distant cyclotroneers “sitting open mouthed, almost believing that the camera must lie.”
• • •
Resolving the operational problems of late 1935 introduced a new occupational hazard for the Rad Lab staff: tedium. By early 1937, Cooksey reported to a friend, “The boys are all complaining because the cyclotron has become so dull.”
This complaint was an outgrowth of the lab’s chronic shortcoming: the lack of time for basic scientific experimentation.
Its main cause was the increasing pressure to produce radioisotopes in bulk. By early 1937, the lab was regularly producing material for “two dozen physicists, half a dozen biologists, and several chemists,” as an early chronicle reported. Ed McMillan expressed a widely shared Rad Lab sentiment when he tweaked Ernest, tactfully: “We hope very soon to be able to satisfy the hoards [sic] of biologists that are swarming around looking for radioactive samples, and perhaps to get in a little bombardment for ourselves.” Lawrence told Cockcroft in late 1937 that in nuclear physics the lab had found “nothing particularly exciting at this moment to report”; but in fact McMillan and Alvarez, among other scientists, were convinced there would be no dearth of exciting discoveries to report if only they had time to look. Yet Ernest considered the willing distribution of isotopes to all applicants to be a crucial component of the lab’s development. He turned away few requests and received fulsome gratitude in return. His response to the mounting demands was not to reorder priorities to give his staff and graduate students some breathing space, but to add a late-night shift to keep the cyclotron running around the clock.