Everything about Edwin M Mcmillan totally explained
Edwin Mattison McMillan (
September 18,
1907 –
September 7,
1991) was the first scientist to produce a
transuranium element.
He was born in
Redondo Beach, California, but his family moved to
Pasadena the following year. He attended some of the public lectures at the
California Institute of Technology as high school student and began his studies there in 1924. He did a research project with
Linus Pauling as undergraduate and received his
Bachelor of Science degree in 1928 and his
Master of Science degree in 1929, both from the
California Institute of Technology.
He then took his
Doctor of Philosophy from
Princeton University in 1932 for the thesis: "Deflection of a Beam of
HCI Molecules in a Non-Homogeneous Electric Field" under the supervision of
Edward Condon.
He joined the group of
Ernest Lawrence at the
University of California, Berkeley upon receiving his doctorate, moving to the
Berkeley Radiation Laboratory when it was founded at Berkeley in 1934.
His experimental skills lead to the discovery of oxygen-15 with
M. Stanley Livingston and beryllium-10 with
Samuel Ruben
In 1940 he and
Philip Abelson created
neptunium, while conducting a fission experiment of
uranium-239 with
neutrons, using the
cyclotron at Berkeley. The newly found isotope of neptunium was created by absorption of neutron into the uranium-239 and a subsequent beta decay. McMillan understood the underlying principle of the reaction and started to bombard the uranium-239 with
deuterium to create the element 94. He moved to the radar research at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Glenn T. Seaborg finished the work.
In
World War II, he was involved in research on
radar at
MIT in
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
sonar near
San Diego, and
nuclear weapons at the
Los Alamos Laboratory. After this unsteady time during the World War II, he joined the
Berkeley Radiation Laboratory again and became head of the institute after the death of Ernest Lawrence in 1958.
In 1945 he developed ideas for the improvement of the cyclotron, leading to the development of the
synchrotron. The synchrotron was used to create new elements at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory extending the
periodic system of elements far beyond the 92 elements known before 1940.
With
Glenn T. Seaborg, he shared the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for the creation of the first transuranium elements.
In 1946, he became a full professor at Berkeley, and in 1954 he was appointed associate director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, being promoted to director in 1958, where he stayed until his retirement in 1973.
He was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences in 1947, serving as its chairman from 1968 to 1971.
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