Finding Aid to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Office of the Director records of Edwin M. McMillan, 1940-1973

Selected Search Terms

These papers have been indexed in the International Catalog of Sources for History of Physics and Allied Sciences (ICOS) using the following terms. Those seeking related materials should search under these terms.

Historical Note

The laboratory was founded as the University of California Radiation Laboratory in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory, operated by the University of California. The name of the laboratory has evolved since its founding: Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (1931-1958), the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (1959-1995), and currently the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (1995-present).

Edwin McMillan (1907-1991) was an American physicist and Nobel laureate credited with being the first ever to produce a transuranium element. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seaborg in 1951.

Scope and Contents of Collection

This collection contains Edwin McMillan’s personal and professional correspondence from his time as Director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL). The personal papers consist of confidential correspondence regarding lab personnel, correspondence with laboratory members such as Ernest Lawrence and Donald Cooksey, and correspondence and clippings relating to McMillan's discovery of neptunium and plutonium. There is also a small collection of business correspondence, mostly related to accepting and declining positions, including a response from President Eisenhower accepting McMillan's retirement. The collection also includes salary and wage letters, statements for McMillan and other LBL staff from his time as director, files of newspaper clippings, announcements, correspondence, and lab related photographs. The photographs are generally devoid of metadata; however, some of the photographs contain their original collection tag numbers and the original metadata may be able to be located via LBL’s photo laboratory. The collection also contains an old item-level inventory created by the LBL Archives and Records Office. Only a small portion of the items listed in the inventory are contained in this collection; however, it may help to identify individual photographs, and it may help researchers locate certain documents in the collection.

Access to Collection

This collection requires permission for access. Please contact the repository for more information, via email at aro@lbl.gov.

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