Part I, History of the cyclotron

OCT 01, 1959

On May 1, 1959, in memory of the late Ernest Orlando Lawrence, two invited lectures on the history of the cyclotron were presented as part of the American Physical Society’s annual spring meeting in Washington, D.C. The present article is based on Prof. Livingston’s talk on that occasion. The second speaker was E. M. McMillan, whose illustrated account also appears in this issue beginning on p. 24.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3060517

M. Stanley Livingston

The principle of the magnetic resonance accelerator, now known as the cyclotron, was proposed by Professor Ernest O. Lawrence of the University of California in 1930, in a short article in Science by Lawrence and N. E. Edlefsen. It was suggested by the experiment of Wideröe in 1928, in which ions of Na and K were accelerated to twice the applied voltage while traversing two tubular electrodes in line between which an oscillatory electric field was applied—an elementary linear accelerator. In 1953 Professor Lawrence described to the writer the origin of the idea, as he then remembered it.

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References

1. E. O. Lawrence and N. E. Edlefsen, Science 72, 376 (1930).https://doi.org/SCIEAS
2. R. Wideröe, Arch. Elektrotech. 21, 387 (1928).
3. M. S. Livingston, “The Production of High‐Velocity Hydrogen Ions without the Use of High Voltages”. PhD thesis, University of California, April 14, 1931.
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More about the Authors

M. Stanley Livingston. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.