Ernest Lawrence

9 0 Y E R N E S T L A W R E N C E J O H N C A N A D A Y Director of the Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, 1945 To peddle a better beater. Broader shouldered and wasp waisted, its cradled double floats in struck-up loops set snug in frame limb, driven by a winged shaft clinched in perforated pinions. A dream of stamped sheet metal’s easy action. Skill and scope and spirit of the art. A simple hawk to farmers’ wives caressed by high plains winds, disheveled, creased. A cinch to demonstrate. Bouquet of sweet transformer oil. Crisp hum of current, surge and cackle. Blossom of sparks from shorted coils. Calamity and revelation. A dozen minds upended on a table strewn with hand-cut relay boxes, tonsured vacuum tubes, and cracked wax gaskets. To ride invention’s swells each day, to dodge a hoist hook’s fickle pendulum. Each night to tune the bedside radio and drift upon an oscillator’s static surf as light bulbs flicker in my boys’ bare hands. Our biggest bang a bomb? Fudge. Rather to nudge five million million million millionths of a gram. To do such things a bore of theorists would take a tedious, pig-headed while to penetrate (or else a single man named Niels). To stay 9 1 R out front. Stockpile. Expand. To rest less than the wicked, prosper more. To leverage, grapple, calibrate until our little talents render unto Caesar instruments, titanic and precise, as might measure God’s least fingerprints. No way to demonstrate. Our bay much like the one on which an emperor looks out, too vast and undulating. Enough to swallow Little Boy and all his brothers, as mere flies in a cathedral. Yet how much more that other boyhood prairie where whole ox trains vanished, hoof and snout, their drivers dreaming of a life in sod, earthed and conductive, the world for them no less than us a wide place, wild and begging cultivation, colter to keel, and then spring-tooth, drag, or spike, a harrowing. ...