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“I am hastening to let you know that the experiments on the production of high speed protons have been successful beyond our expectations,” Lawrence wrote to Dr. Frederick Gardner Cottrell on July 17. “The work has advanced to an exceedingly important stage and the greatest difficulty now facing us is no longer of an experimental nature, but one of finance.”
This letter signifies the start of a crucial new phase in Lawrence’s transformation from hands-on physicist to fund-raising impresario. No longer were the university’s resources, parceled out at a few hundred dollars at a time, sufficient for his purposes. The next accelerator would require thousands of dollars, and for that, he needed a new patron. That is where Frederick Cottrell came in.
Cottrell had been a popular professor of physical chemistry at Berkeley in 1908, when he received a patent for a process to precipitate impurities out of smokestack emissions by passing them through an electrically charged grid. He was thirty-one and had accepted a commission from E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, the giant chemical manufacturer, which hoped to recover waste sulphuric acid from its smokestacks, because his father’s death had left the family deeply in debt. His invention, it turned out, could also cleanse noxious vapors and particulates from smelter effluent, coal particles from mine air, and much more. With three partners, Cottrell established a company to commercialize the process. But the idea of a university professor making money from what were essentially the fruits of academic research left him uneasy. At heart, he was a professor, not an industrialist. This was not an unusual mind-set for the period, when the model of basic research still harked back to the work of eminent scientists devoted to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge—men such as Louis Pasteur, who was famous for having declared, “I could never work for money, but I would always work for science.”
The question of what should be done with the discoveries pouring out of university laboratories was widely debated in academia. Wrote Abraham Flexner, a leading authority on the responsibilities of the American university, “[T]he moment that research is utilized as a source of profit, its spirit is debased.” Yet the genteel detachment of Pasteur and his contemporaries seemed quaint, even foolish, given the profits to be made in the industrial world. Professors could only envy the millions pocketed by radio entrepreneurs from the discoveries of those pioneers of electromagnetism Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, who had claimed no patents and earned nothing.
University conferences and professional committees worried over the conflicts and compromises presented by academic profit seeking. Should public universities license discoveries funded with taxpayer dollars so that private corporations could sell them for profit to those same taxpayers? Who really deserved the patent for a discovery that might be based on the work of innumerable scientists over years or decades? What might happen to the unfettered give-and-take among scientific colleagues if they were turned into rivals when the search for truth was overtaken by the race for commercial advantage? How would beckoning wealth affect the scientific method, in which one might learn much from (unprofitable) failure in the disinterested search for truth?
Were scientists to be researchers or businesspersons? Alan Gregg, the medical director of the Rockefeller Foundation, relayed the complaint of “the dean of one of our larger medical schools” that one of his faculty members was “so busy controlling the product made under a patent held by the university that there is no time left for research or teaching.” And the distinguished British scientific administrator Walter Fletcher warned an American audience that commercial prospects were certain to exercise “a vicious influence” over academic standards. “The university will be more inclined to reward by pay or promotion him who makes some addition to knowledge of an immediately profitable kind rather than him who works for knowledge itself,” he said. “Nothing could be more disastrous than this, as we know, to the advancement of knowledge itself.”
Then there was the reality that funding for basic research was always in danger of cutbacks, especially in periods of economic strain. “Science is dependent on wealth for its material support,” observed Harper’s Monthly in 1936. “Laboratories cost money to equip and maintain, and lately it has become increasingly difficult to obtain this necessary wherewithal. Endowments have shrunken . . . the appropriations of the governments for pure science have been curtailed . . . Science creates wealth; why then should it not turn its talents to a program of self-support?”
Many of these issues remain unresolved to this day; one can only imagine the ferocity of the debate that raged when they were new.
It was clear that a way had to be found to capture the profits of laboratory discoveries without undermining academic standards or constraining scientific inquiry. A pioneering model emerged at the University of Wisconsin, where Professor Harry Steenbock had invented a way to fortify foods with vitamin D. Rather than keep the patent rights to himself, he cofounded the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF, which took possession of his patent in 1925 and promptly licensed it to the Quaker Oats Company. By 1930, the patent was generating $1,000 a day, all of it reinvested in University of Wisconsin research. Other major research universities adopted the WARF model, though not the University of California, which required any faculty member with a patentable invention to present its particulars to the university president, who would then appoint a board to advise him “as to the action, if any, which should be taken by the Board of Regents with respect to the invention.” Berkeley’s ability to exploit its increasingly inventive faculty’s work stagnated under this lumbering regime until 1931, when Sproul met Frederick Cottrell.
Within a year of receiving his own patent, Cottrell was pondering how to use his profits as feedstock for a nationwide “endowment for scientific work”—a foundation that would assemble a broad portfolio of patents and use its profits to support promising scientists all over the country. The main challenge lay in finding an entity to endow. The University of California was a logical beneficiary of his own patent rights, since Cottrell’s work had been done in its laboratories. But its administration was utterly unable to reconcile its responsibilities as a disinterested servant of the public interest and those of an owner of a commercially valuable patent. Instead, Cottrell established an independent philanthropy, the Research Corporation, in 1912. As its birthright, the corporation received Cottrell’s patent and his directive that it be exploited for profit to fund grants for scientific research. The corporation’s directors were empowered to fatten its portfolio with other promising inventions and use them the same way.
Over the following two decades, however, Cottrell’s dream faltered. The problem was that out of a surfeit of integrity, he had refused to accept any formal management position with the corporation, instead handing control to a board of industrialists over whom he exercised no authority or even much influence. These hidebound trustees were determined to run the Research Corporation as conservatively as they ran their own businesses—that is, accumulating a large capital cushion before starting to give it away. By 1930, the value of the Research Corporation’s patent rights exceeded $1 million. But its grant portfolio was a measly $23,000.
Fortunately for Ernest Lawrence, the old mind-set was already changing. The process had begun in 1927 with the appointment of a new president of the Research Corporation. He was Howard Poillon, a hardheaded businessman who was determined to make the most of the corporation’s growing patent portfolio but also more willing to defer to Cottrell’s wishes and judgment on philanthropic matters. The two men would work together for fifteen years, during which they created a model for the philanthropic support of science that would spread to the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and other leading institutional patrons of research.
Under Cottrell’s influence, Sproul rescinded Berkeley’s patent policy. Henceforth, faculty members with patentable inventions would have “full freedom of action” to exploit them but were quietly encouraged to refer them to the
Research Corporation, which would make private arrangements with the inventor for royalties. The university would claim no rights, but it was understood that in recognition of Berkeley’s role in productive patents, the corporation might make financial contributions “from time to time at its discretion” to support research on the campus. It was a healthy symbiotic relationship, for the Research Corporation would function as Berkeley’s patent agent, and the university would become one of the corporation’s most important beneficiaries.
With that relationship now established, and in his role as scientific advisor to Poillon, Frederick Cottrell began to educate himself about what was going on in Ernest Lawrence’s lab. It took very little time for him to appreciate its significance. Writing Poillon on July 7, 1931, Cottrell flagged Lawrence’s work as something that “may prove to be very big indeed.” He described Ernest as “a man we should keep close track of. He is young enough and with a sufficiently good early start to go far. He not only does good work himself, but I have been particularly impressed with how much he manages to get out of his graduate students on the research problems of which he keeps a surprising number going full blast.” Of these projects, he identified two—Sloan’s X-ray tube and the accelerator, not yet known as the cyclotron—as “rather spectacular and important in their early developments.”
Lawrence, who was already angling assiduously for the Research Corporation’s generosity, had kept Cottrell apprised of progress on the eleven-inch accelerator, culminating in his July 17 letter announcing success “beyond our expectations” and identifying “finance” as the only limiting factor. Lawrence was now focused beyond the million-volt threshold. Twenty million volts was the next step. In search of the crucial piece of a new, larger accelerator, his eye had settled on an eighty-ton magnet that had been forged for a canceled project in China and now stood derelict in a vacant lot on the premises of its manufacturer, Federal Telegraph Company, in a San Francisco suburb. Since the power production of the cyclotron was directly proportional to the size of its magnet, this would be a major leap forward. But as Lawrence informed Cottrell, the magnet would require its own building and a brand-new array of high-powered oscillators and other accessories. The bill, he estimated, would approach $10,000. In an overt hint that he saw his work as the proper subject of funding from research-oriented charities of all kinds, he mentioned that colleagues had advised him to solicit the money from the Carnegie Foundation, which had “special funds for special research projects.” Then he added, reassuringly: “I, of course, immediately thought of you.”
The Research Corporation would take the plunge, drawing in as a partner the Chemical Foundation, a more affluent organization that had been formed by the US government in 1918 to manage German chemical patents seized as war booty. The two foundations contributed jointly $7,500 and the university the balance of a price tag that swelled to $12,000 by the time Ernest’s new accelerator was ready to start operating in late 1931—even despite his having prevailed on Federal Telegraph to donate the magnet for free, in an early manifestation of his ability to extract more than mere cash from his well-placed patrons. As part of the university’s contribution, Sproul turned over to Lawrence a two-story wood structure on campus, just across a narrow alley from Gilbert Lewis’s chemistry building. There Ernest installed the new magnet, its pole faces specially milled to accommodate a new vacuum tank twenty-seven inches in diameter. He would christen the building, which had been slated for demolition but featured sturdy concrete underpinnings, as the Radiation Laboratory. (The name has “the advantage of brevity,” he advised Sproul.) With that step, Ernest Lawrence became more than just another physics professor with a clutch of graduate students in his charge. He had staked out a personal fiefdom on campus. This was the beginning of what would be known, with even greater brevity, as the Rad Lab, and the launch of a new paradigm in scientific research.
Ernest’s burgeoning relationship with the Research Corporation forced him to deal with the novel (to him) concept of patenting. At the outset, he shared the university scientist’s traditional antipathy to the patent process, so redolent of commercialism and so distinctly unacademic. This provoked a sharp reaction from Poillon, who urged Cottrell to keep his protégé mindful of the financial value of his work: “If he is one of the men that we are going to make awards to from time to time, it seems that we should develop his protective instincts.”
Lawrence reluctantly agreed to meet with the corporation’s Los Angeles patent attorney, Arthur Knight. But the last of his resistance was dispelled by a flash of unwelcome news one day in September. Raytheon Company, a maker of radio tubes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had applied for a patent on a machine that sounded suspiciously like his spiral accelerator. The word came from John Slater, MIT’s physics chairman, who was passing on thirdhand information from a National Research Fellow in his laboratory, who heard it from a friend at Harvard working at Raytheon part-time. Slater wrote Lawrence that the application concerned “your proton merry-go-round . . . It never would have occurred to me to patent such a thing but I thought at any rate you would want to know.” Lawrence replied that “it never occurred to me to patent the work we are doing either, and I am doing so only at the urgent request of the Research Corporation and the Chemical Foundation.” Now he was alive to the risk that a private corporation might steal away with the rights to his invention if he did not promptly establish his prior claim. At Knight’s direction, he solicited a statement from his old friend Tom Johnson (now working with Swann at the Bartol Institute), confirming that Johnson had witnessed Lawrence’s examination of the Wideröe paper in the university library in April 1929 with his own eyes, and had heard him describe on the spot “his method for spiraling protons around in a magnetic field and increasing their energy at each half revolution.” From Otto Stern, Ernest obtained a note attesting that “during my stay in Berkeley [at the] beginning [of] 1930 you had often talked to me about your experiments with the production of very fast light ions in the form in which you have published them now.”
Lawrence’s relationship with the patent bureaucracy would never be particularly comfortable or, for that matter, lucrative. The idea of patenting the cyclotron cut against the grain of an inventor whose interest lay more in the machine’s proliferation across academia than in its commercial licensing, especially since its industrial utility was still hard to divine. A further irritant was the inability of patent office examiners to grasp Lawrence’s work, which resulted in skeptical questioning of his patent claims. “It is apparent that the person who reviewed our patent application has not much of any idea of what it is all about,” Lawrence grumbled to Knight at the midpoint of the two-year effort to obtain the cyclotron patent, which was finally issued in February 1932. Lawrence eventually accepted the patenting of scientific inventions as a necessary evil. “It is entirely proper, indeed almost a duty, for the research worker to bear in mind the commercial possibilities of his work, to the end that some of the fruits of commercial development will return in the support of his work,” he acknowledged to Poillon in 1935. But he found the process “distinctly unpleasant”—especially following a prolonged and ultimately fruitless wrangle with the patent office a few years later over his methods for producing radioactive isotopes. After the cyclotron, Lawrence would not receive another patent until wartime, when federal officials demanded that his inventive process for uranium separation be protected legally—and the patent rights be assigned permanently to the government.
While the twenty-seven-inch accelerator was still on the drawing board, Lawrence and Livingston worked intently to improve the performance of the eleven-inch chamber that Livingston had built for the old magnet. It was a brass box, its vacuum maintained by the usual liberal applications of sealing wax. A breakthrough finally occurred in the late summer of 1931, while Ernest was on the East Coast to meet with the Research Corporation’s board in New York and to propose to Molly Blumer, who was soon to begin work at Harvard for a master’s degree i
n bacteriology. (“I am beginning to realize I have two consuming loves—Molly and research!” he confided effusively to his Yale friend Donald Cooksey before leaving for the East.)
Livingston took the opportunity of Ernest’s absence to make a subtle change in the vacuum chamber’s design on his own. Lawrence had decreed that the electrical field that delivered the sequential jolts to the spiraling protons should be present only in the gap between the two dees. The dees’ interior was to be free of any electrical field, which he thought would interfere with the magnetic field keeping the particles in their spiral. They had fenced off the parallel faces of each dee with a grid of fine tungsten wires to prevent the electrical field from impinging within the dees while allowing the particle beam to pass through. Both men were flying blind, neither having had the slightest training in electrical field theory. But now Livingston, frustrated by the low current and energy of the beam, guessed that the grid was blocking more than they thought. He broke open the vacuum chamber and pulled off the tungsten grids by hand. This was a perfect expression of what would become the lab’s practice of “cut and try” in its early years: while theory was still so rudimentary, often the only way to test one’s hunches was to put them into practice and see what happened. In this case, Livingston would recall, he was operating “more or less intuitively—I didn’t have any reason for doing it except that I had an urge to get something out of the way.” The current and energy leaped higher instantly. On August 3, Livingston dictated a wire for the Physics Department secretary to send to Lawrence, care of the Blumer household in New Haven:
“Dr. Livingston has asked me to advise you that he has obtained 1,100,000 volt protons. He also suggested that I add ‘Whoopee.’ ” Lawrence read out the message to the Blumer family circle that night, and then escorted Molly outside to the porch and proposed. She accepted, with the proviso that the wedding take place in the spring, after she received her degree. With her promise in hand and the prospect of further breakthroughs awaiting him in the lab, he returned to Berkeley in euphoria.
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