Ernest Lawrence a scrap of a paper napkin. While sitting in the library one evening in 1929, Lawrence glanced over a journal article by Rolf Widerøe, and was intrigued by one of the diagrams. This depicted a device that produced high-energy particles by means of a succession of small "pushes". The device depicted was laid out in a straight line using increasingly longer electrodes. At the time, physicists were beginning to explore the atomic nucleus. In 1919, the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford had fired alpha particles into nitrogen and had succeeded in knocking protons out of some of the nuclei. But
Dubnium by bombarding californium-249 with nitrogen-15 ions, with an alpha activity of 9.1 MeV. To ensure this activity was not from a different reaction, the team attempted other reactions: bombarding Cf with N, Pb with N, and Hg with N. They stated no such activity was found in those reactions. The characteristics of the daughter nuclei matched those of 103, implying that the parent nuclei were of 105. These results did not confirm the JINR findings regarding the 9.4 MeV or 9.7 MeV alpha decay of 105, leaving only 105 as a possibly produced isotope. JINR then attempted another experiment to