Ernest Lawrence

Ernest Lawrence was an American physicist who developed the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator, beginning in 1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and later adapted the same magnetic technology to build the calutron, the electromagnetic isotope separation device that produced the enriched uranium used in the Manhattan Project weapon dropped on Hiroshima. He founded and directed the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, which grew from his early cyclotron work into the national laboratories that today bear his name, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Lawrence won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for the cyclotron and its results, and oversaw the large calutron uranium-separation plant built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee during the war.