Part II, History of the cyclotron

As Dr. Livingston has told you, our activities overlapped by a few months, so that between, us we can give a continuous story of cyclotron development as carried out at Berkeley under the guidance of Professor Lawrence. My start in his laboratory was in April of 1934, but I was around Berkeley before that working in Le Conte Hall on a molecular beam problem. Therefore, I have two kinds of early memories of the Radiation Laboratory at that time. One is as a place that I visited occasionally before I was working there; the other is as a place where I came to work, which I remember better, although it still seems like a very long time ago. The whole way of working was rather different from what it is in most laboratories today. We did practically everything ourselves. We had no professional engineers, so we had to design our own apparatus; we made sketches for the shop, and did much of our own machine work; we took all of our own data, did all our own calculations, and wrote all our own papers. Things are now quite different from that, because everybody does just his share and the operations have become much larger and more professional. While the modern method produces more results, perhaps this older way may have been more fun.

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