Lawrence, Ernest Orlando (1901-1958), an American physicist, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1939 for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it. A cyclotron is a machine that accelerates atomic particles between the poles of an electromagnet.
Lawrence started construction of a huge cyclotron at Berkeley, California, before World War II (1939-1945). He converted it during the war to develop a method for separating the isotope 235 of uranium for one of two types of nuclear-fission bomb. After the war, the machine was completed as an accelerator that could speed charged atomic particles to energies equivalent to that of an electron acted on by 400 million volts. In 1948, this machine was the first to detect a subnuclear particle called the meson (see Meson ). In 1954, Lawrence helped complete a more powerful accelerator. He was born on Aug. 8, 1901, in Canton, South Dakota. He died on Aug. 27, 1958.
