The discovery of element 43 was finally confirmed in a December 1936 experiment at the University of Palermo in Sicily by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè.[12] In mid-1936, Segrè visited the United States, first Columbia University in New York and then the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He persuaded cyclotron inventor Ernest Lawrence to let him take back some discarded cyclotron parts that had become radioactive.