YOUTHS BUILD CYCLOTRON

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25227, 4 July 1947, Page 9

YOUTHS BUILD CYCLOTRON

COST OF 500 DOLLARS

CAPACITY FOR PRODUCING RADIO-ISOTOPES

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 12.30 a.m.) NEW YORK, July 2. Four high school boys, of whom three are aged 17, and the other 18, will throw a switch within the next few days and turn on power in their own 1,000,000-volt cyclotron, built with their own hands, at a cost of 500 dollars, says the El Centro (California) correspondent of the New York ‘ ‘Herald-Tribune.”

The cyclotron is not a model, but a working-size atom-smasher, which is expected to turn out radio-active isotopes and do all the work that any cyclotron can do. It is almost exactly the size of the first cyclotron built in 1931 by Dr. Ernest Lawrence of the University of California, who received for his work the Nobel Prize in physics. The youths’ names are Karl Zellman, Richard Sinnott, Charles Williams, and Lee Danner, j The ‘‘Herald-Tribune,’' commenting in a leading article on the youths’ achievement, says: “High school students can make equipment here capable of turning out radio-active materials. Let us be charitable and admit that Russian adults can make them in Russia. Perhaps in the near future, a group of high school boys will turn out an atom bomb. It would be a dangerous feat, but it would make even clearer the important fact that the knowledge of physics is not something that can be locked up in a vault.”