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Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Volume I

University of California Press

Ernest Orlando Lawrence, the protagonist of our story, had much in common with the first European to explore the coasts of Northern California. Sir Francis Drake was an adventurer, a master of navigation and other contemporary high technologies, and withal a scientist, a collector and student of the flora and fauna of the new worlds he discovered. And, like Lawrence, Drake missed spectacular discoveries under his nose: he overlooked or overran the Golden Gate, the entrance to San Francisco Bay, which lies a day's sail south of his probable anchorage.1

Today's sailor who enters the Gate, or today's tourist who surveys the panorama from its northern shore, sees two great steel bridges, each an engineering wonder when built, which define a body of water hemmed in by factories and harbors, and much reduced from its size in Drake's time by the operations of later entrepreneurs. The south shore of the Gate lies in San Francisco, which spreads over a peninsula washed by the Pacific Ocean on the west and the Bay on the east, and carrying, to the south, Silicon Valley, the home of electronic high technology. Across the Bay, on its eastern shore, the conurbation continues in Oakland and Berkeley. Above Berkeley, on hills facing the Gate, rises a great Laboratory that commands a magnificent view of the Bay Area. The people who work there do not study the view, however, or much else that they can see unaided. Most of their exploring concerns the behavior of molecules, atoms, nuclei, and radiation.

The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is now functionally a multipurpose research facility of the Department of Energy, admini-

For Drake's science see Allen and Parkinson, Examination .

stered by the University of California. Its bureaucratization, growth, diversification, and nationalization have reduced the significance of local color and influence on its operations. But in the period covered by this volume, the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, or "Rad Lab," which preceded the complex on the hill, grew in a manner and at a pace that are unintelligible without reference to the character of the region and the state that supported it.

Half a century after the Gold Rush of 1849, California showed the marks of an urbanized, commercialized society: although agriculturally rich, it began to rely heavily upon electricity, petroleum, and steel. The technological requirements rose sharply during the first twenty years of the twentieth century, when the state's population more than doubled, its output in agriculture, mining, petroleum, lumbering, and fishing increased severalfold, and hydroelectric power, motion pictures, and the cult of the automobile gave it a distinctive character.2

The culture derived from these elements mixed the pioneering of the Gold Rush, the boosterism of rapid expansion, the make-believe of Hollywood, and the confidence of technological expertise. A precocious expression of the California spirit was the foundation of an Academy of Sciences in San Francisco in 1853. Its immediate stimulus was a survey of coasts and harbors undertaken to safeguard navigation. We hear the booster and the entrepreneur, the student and the dreamer, in the founders' declaration, "It is due to science, it is due to California, to her sister states, and to the scientific world, that early means be adopted for a thorough survey of every portion of the State and the collection of a cabinet of her rare and rich productions." And we are sensible of the rawness and violence of the society that produced the academy in its adjourning to a discussion of the trees of North America after attending the hanging of an outlaw who had killed its president. Two decades later, the great captains and pirates of

Cleland, California , 105.

California's first commercialization, men like Leland Stanford, David Colton, Charles Crocker, and James Lick, gave the academy the wherewithal to build a museum of natural history, sponsor a lecture series, and represent culture at the edge of the civilized world.3

The rawness and vigor, the culture and pretentiousness, the hucksterism and fantasy, were celebrated in the grand Panama-Pacific Exposition held on newly filled waterfront in San Francisco in 1915. The official poster of the exposition (plate 1.1) might have been designed as frontispiece for Lawrence's first Radiation Laboratory: a monumental Hercules cracking open the resistant earth (he is making the Panama Canal, but could be smashing atoms) to disclose a dream city in fairyland (it is the exposition itself, but could be the future powered by atomic energy). Within the exposition, "the only place . . . in the United States where romance seems pervasive and inevitable," stood halls filled with California's natural plenty and with the machinery that harvested, transformed, and transported it.4 The Palace of Mines and Metallurgy proffered two big balls of gold, and a hydraulic mine and gold dredger, as proof of California's mastery of the precincts of Pluto. Further to the theme, it presented "ample evidence of the great figure which steel now makes in the world, and of the vast extent of the petroleum industry." Andan unreadable indicator of a theme that will preoccupy usthere was a tiny sample of radium. "Being so little of it in the world," a children's guide to the fair explained, "it is tremendously expensive."5 Lawrence would change that.

The Palace of Machinery also pointed directly to California's future. It emphasized, in the words of a contemporary journalist, "the increasing displacement of coal by hydroelectric plants and liquid fuels." To this proposition the prime mover of the exposition gave silent testimony. Power came from the Sierra via hightension electrical lines; there was nothing in San Francisco resembling the mountainous Corliss engine, some thirty-nine feet tall

Lewis, George Davidson , 601.

Dobkin in Benedict, World's fairs , 67; Brechin, ibid., 94, 101 (quote from Edmund Wilson); Anderson, ibid., 1145.

Quotes from Macomber, Jewel city , 150, and Gordon, What we saw , 45.

and weighing 1.4 million pounds, whose steam had moved the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. It had delivered some 1,400 horsepower. The exposition of 1915 showed the Corliss's latter-day competitor, one of those instruments for replacing dirty coal with clean liquid fuels, a Diesel engine that also developed 1,400 horsepower. This engine, called to life by a radio signal from President Wilson, stood seven feet tall and weighed 44,000 pounds, an item of domestic furniture in comparison with steam engines. And so it was housed, in a booth trimmed with oriental rugs and finished in fine woods, with attendants in white uniforms who "looked like guests aboard a yacht."6

A more direct symbol of transportation was the gasoline engine, exhibited in every size and form, since, as the official historian of the exposition observed, San Francisco, so far from coal and so close to oil, had naturally become a center for its development. A...