BY ERNEST D. COURANT

ON JANUARY 9, 1932, in Berkeley, California, a magnetic resonance accelerator (cyclotron) built by M. Stanley Livingston accelerated protons to 1.22 MeV (million electron volts), the first time that particles with energies exceeding one million volts had been produced by man. Twenty years later, in May 1952, the Cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory, whose construction Livingston had initiated, became the world's first billion-volt (GeV) accelerator. By the time of his death in 1986 the world record had gone up by three more orders of magnitude to 900 GeV, thanks to an innovation by Livingston and others.

Milton Stanley Livingston was born in Broadhead, Wisconsin, on May 25, 1905, the son of Milton McWhorter Livingston and his wife Sarah Jane, née Ten Eyck. His father was a divinity student who soon became minister of a local church. When Stanley was about five years old the family moved to southern California, where his father became a high school teacher and later principal, having found that a minister's salary was inadequate to support a growing family. On the side he bought a 10-acre orange grove and ranch.

As the only son in the family—there were three sisters—Stanley