cyclotron
1929 AD invented
The invention that brought Lawrence to international fame started out as a sketch on a scrap of a paper napkin. While sitting in the library one evening in 1929, Lawrence glanced over a journal article by Rolf Widerøe, and was intrigued by one of the diagrams.
This depicted a device that produced high-energy particles by means of a succession of small "pushes". The device depicted was laid out in a straight line using increasingly longer electrodes. At the time, physicists were beginning to explore the atomic nucleus. In 1919, the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford had fired alpha particles into nitrogen and had succeeded in knocking protons out of some of the nuclei. But nuclei have a positive charge that repels other positively charged nuclei, and they are bound together tightly by a force that physicists were only just beginning to understand. To break them up, to disintegrate them, would require much higher energies, of the order of millions of volts.[
Lattitude: 37.8716° N
Longitude: 122.2727° W
Region: North America
Modern Day United States
Subjects Who or What invented?
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Ernest Lawrence American nuclear physici...
Objects To Whom or What was invented?
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Particle accelerator A machine that uses elec...
Events in 1929 MORE
