detection apparatus. Although important discoveries continued to elude Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory, mainly due to its focus on the development of the cyclotron rather than its scientific use, through his increasingly larger machines, Lawrence was able to provide crucial equipment needed for experiments in high energy physics. Around this device, he built what became the world's foremost laboratory for the new field of nuclear physics research in the 1930s. He received a patent for the cyclotron in 1934, which he assigned to the Research Corporation, a private foundation that funded much of Lawrence's early work. In February 1936, Harvard University's president, James B. Conant, made attractive offers to Lawrence and Oppenheimer. The University of California's president, Robert Gordon Sproul, responded by improving conditions. The Radiation Laboratory became an official department of the University of California on July 1, 1936, with Lawrence formally appointed its director, with a full-time assistant director, and the university agreed to make $20,000 a year available for its research activities. Lawrence employed a simple business model: "He staffed his laboratory with graduate students and junior faculty of the physics department, with fresh Ph.D.s willing to work for anything, and with fellowship holders and wealthy guests able to serve for nothing." Reception Using the new 27-inch cyclotron, the team at Berkeley discovered that every element that they bombarded with recently discovered deuterium emitted energy, and in the same range. They, therefore, postulated the existence of a new and hitherto unknown particle that was a possible source of limitless energy. William Laurence of The New York Times described Lawrence as "a new miracle worker of science". At Cockcroft's invitation, Lawrence attended the 1933 Solvay Conference in Belgium. This was a regular gathering of the world's top physicists. Nearly all were from Europe, but occasionally an outstanding American scientist like Robert A. Millikan or Arthur Compton would be invited to attend. Lawrence was asked to give a presentation on the cyclotron. Lawrence's claims of limitless energy met a very different reception in Solvay. He ran into withering skepticism from the Cavendish Laboratory's James Chadwick, the physicist who had discovered the neutron in 1932, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1935. In a British accent that sounded condescending to Lawrence's ears, Chadwick suggested that what Lawrence's team was observing was contamination of their apparatus. When he returned to Berkeley, Lawrence mobilized his team to go painstakingly over the