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
Nuclear fission The feat was popularly known as "splitting the atom", and would win them the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics for ""Transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles"", although it was not the modern nuclear fission reaction later discovered in heavy elements, which is discussed below. Meanwhile, the possibility of "combining" nuclei—nuclear fusion—had been studied in connection with understanding the processes which power stars. The first artificial fusion reaction had been achieved by Mark Oliphant in 1932, using two accelerated deuterium nuclei (each consisting of a single proton bound to a single neutron) to create a helium-3 nucleus. After