Born in Canton, South Dakota, E. O. Lawrence is best known as the inventor of the cyclotron in 1930. For this development, Lawrence won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1939. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1925. In 1928, he joined the faculty at Berkeley, where we began working with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Lawrence was involved with the American atomic bomb project from the nearly the beginning. He was in charge of the electromagnetic separation work at Oak Ridge that provided the fissionable material.
