ABSTRACT
Most important for the purpose, both Merle Tuve and E. Lawrence established their own distinct 'schools' of accelerator and nuclear physics, characterized by differences in attitudes and motivations, and by similarities in promoting technologyintensive, team-oriented approaches to experimental science that became the modus operandi of American physics after 1932. If 1932 was the annus mirabilis of nuclear physics, 1928 was a good year as well in Berkeley, California. Clinton J. Davisson saw the back-scattered electrons as a tool for probing the extranuclear structure of atoms, much as Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden's scattering of ceparticles had led to Ernest Rutherford's nuclear atom in 1911. Nuclear disintegration experiments under a-bombardment were then in full swing at Cambridge, as well as in Vienna, and Gregory Breit was caught up in the accompanying excitement. He discussed the European work with Merle A Tuve and Ernest O Lawrence, and made 'some crude experiments with Tesla coils.'
