Robert Lyster Thornton
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| Robert Lyster Thornton | |
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| Born | November 29, 1908 Wooton, Bedfordshire, England |
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| Died | September 28, 1985 |
Robert Lyster Thornton (November 29, 1908 - September 28, 1985), was born at Wooton, Bedfordshire, England, the son of a mechanical engineer, Dudley L. Thornton, and his wife Katherine Foster. He was educated in Canada, where his family went in his youth, his father being employed by the Canadian Pacific Railway. He attended McGill University for seven years, earning the B.Sc. degree in 1930 and obtaining the Ph.D. degree in physics, under the sponsorship of Stuart Foster, in 1933. His thesis research was on atomic spectroscopy and the Stark effect, an area successfully cultivated by his mentor.
Thornton came to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley in 1933 and most of his later career was connected with that Laboratory where he worked with Professor Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron. The 1930s were years of intense cyclotron development at Berkeley under Lawrence's leadership and Thornton became a prominent member of his team. Thornton worked initially on the 12-inch and 37-inch cyclotrons at Berkeley and on design of the 60-inch cyclotrons.
Toward the end of the 1930s several universities wanted to acquire a cyclotron and turned to Lawrence who often sent detailed plans to those who wanted to build one and loaned one of his collaborators to help with the work. Lawrence sent Thornton to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to lead in the construction of a cyclotron, and where he was also an instructor in Physics from 1936 to 1938. Thornton also served as associate professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, from 1940 to 1942, after which he returned again to Berkeley.
Thornton left Berkeley again in 1940, this time to Washington University at St. Louis, as an associate professor of physics, to head the construction of a cyclotron, one of the best of its time. This period ended in 1942 when the Rad Lab at Berkeley entered massively into the uranium isotope separation endeavor for the Manhattan Project. Lawrence asked Thornton to return to help with development of the calutron project, a gigantic array of modified cyclotrons adapted to the separation of uranium isotopes. In 1943 Thornton became assistant director of the Process Improvement Division of the Tennessee Eastman Corporation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the huge Y-12 plant containing hundreds of calutrons was located.
In 1945 Thornton returned to Berkeley where he led construction of the 184-inch cyclotron, the first large frequency-modulated cyclotron that used the new concept of phase stability. It was highly successful and made possible scientific advances, such as production of the first man-made pions (pi mesons), He also began his 27-year professorial affiliation with the Department of Physics of the University of California at Berkeley, as Professor of Physics. In 1948 he started regular classroom teaching of several upper-division courses in mechanics, modern physics, and electricity and magnetism. In 1954 he was appointed assistant director of the Radiation Laboratory, in 1959 associate director, and in 1967 associate director of program and planning. He was for a long time in charge of scheduling for the 184-inch cyclotron. Thornton retired in 1972.
Robert Thornton married Mary Elizabeth (Betty) Edie in 1938. Their son Denis married Carol Dodd in 1975. Their daughter Margaret married Michael Mendeck in 1974.
