ABSTRACT
Ernest Orlando Lawrence conceived the idea of the cyclotron in 1929 when he went to the University of California at Berkeley. There, together with his student M. Stanley Livingston, he built a cyclotron for accelerating hydrogen ions (protons) up to an energy of 13keV. Although this model was only 4.5 inches in diameter, it demonstrated the principal of acceleration. A second cyclotron followed, able to accelerate protons up to 1.2MeV, high enough to cause nuclear disintegration. In 1936, Lawrence was able to fund the establishment of what would become famous the world over, the Radiation Laboratory with its 60-inch cyclotron in which several new elements were synthesised; it was the sixth machine in the series. Lawrence received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron.
