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California Gold: The Nobel Tradition at UC BerkeleyExhibit Case, The Helen Kennedy Cahill Reference Center
Nobel gold has been "mined" by twenty-one members of the Berkeley faculty and twenty-five alumni. Four of these are alumni and faculty. Fifty-five Nobel medals have been awarded to faculty and researchers affiliated with eight UC campuses and laboratories, twenty-two of these since 1995. Berkeley’s Nobel tradition reflects the distinguished culture of creativity flourishing in the Bay Area, where dozens of laureates have been affiliated with the three major universities and with industry, government, and independent laboratories. UC Berkeley is particularly notable for the large number of chemistry, physics and, more recently, economics laureates, and for the very first Nobel laureate from a public university, Ernest O. Lawrence. Ernest O. Lawrence was the first Berkeley faculty to be awarded the prize and the first laureate at a public university. He invented the cyclotron, the first "atom-smasher," at the age of 29, two years after his arrival at Berkeley. The total cost for materials for the machine was $25.00 - the modest beginnings of "big science." His Nobel medal can be viewed in UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science. In 1983, Chancellor Heyman created a new tradition for Berkeley’s Nobelists. As the chancellor remembers it, he was attending a Regents meeting in Los Angeles in 1983 when the prize was awarded to Gerard Debreu; Heyman announced it to the Regents. After a pause, a regent called across the table to Heyman, "Chancellor, what do you do for a Nobel laureate at Berkeley?" Joking, Heyman responded, "Well, we give them a central campus parking space." The word spread quickly; upon his return to campus Heyman found a stack of telephone messages from Berkeley laureates, each wondering where his parking space was. True to his word, Heyman instituted the new tradition and "NL" parking signs now dot the campus. Visitors are seen photographing the distinctive, and perhaps unique, symbols of distinguished scholarship and a distinguished tradition. The Bancroft Library has also developed its own Nobel tradition, collecting the papers of fourteen Nobel Laureates, including two who were not Berkeleyans: Emil Fischer (Chemistry, 1902) and Otto Stern (Physics, 1943). On display are two Nobel medals as well as facsimiles of photographs and letters drawn from The Bancroft Library's Nobel Laureates collections. The Drake PlateCurrently unavailable for viewing
During his circumnavigation of the globe Francis Drake in 1579 put into a "convenient and fit harborough" in California where he remained about a month to refit his ship. As evidence of his discovery and conquest, he nailed a plate, presumably of brass, to a firm post declaring that the land had been surrendered by its king and people to Queen Elizabeth, whose portrait, depicted on a silver sixpence, was displayed through a hole cut into the plate. In the summer of 1936, a young man, Beryle Shinn, chanced upon a metal plate on a hill overlooking the shore of Point San Quentin and the San Francisco Bay. In course of time this object was brought to Dr. Herbert E. Bolton, Professor of History at the University of California, who surmised that it appeared to be Drake’s original plate and said, "One of the world's long lost historical treasures apparently has been found!" Questions about the plate's authenticity were immediately raised by other scholars, but many persons were satisfied that this was not a forgery since tests made by Dr. Colin G. Fink, Professor of Electro-chemistry at Columbia University and Dr. E.P. Polushkin, a consulting metallurgical engineer of New York City, concluded that this was "the genuine Drake Plate referred to in the book, The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, published in 1628." Nevertheless, the contention that the plate was the work of a modern forger continued to be expressed orally and in print. Some of the questions addressed the crude manner of inscribing the plate, the relatively modern spelling, the curious forms of some of the letters, particularly, B, P, R, M, and N, and some ostensible oddities of the text, such as reference to Queen Elizabeth of England rather than the more common usage, such as, "Elizabeth, by grace of God, Queen of England . . . " In time such misgivings led The Bancroft Library to test the plate’s metal and means of fabrication by using techniques refined or developed in the forty years since the discovery and first metallurgical examination, thus providing more basic or definitive answers than could arguments about the inscription. In 1976 three very small holes were made in the plate and the resultant drillings tested at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at Oxford University and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The Oxford laboratory compared the results of its analyses with 22 examples of English and Continental brasses created between 1540 and 1720. The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory made comparisons with old brass ranging from the 14th to the 18th centuries. At Oxford the plate was found to contain 34.8% (+/- 0.4%) of zinc and at Berkeley the average amount of zinc found was 35.0%, whereas no examples of English or European brass known to have been created prior to 1600 had a content as high as either measurement. Only two of those scrutinized at Oxford had a con-tent exceeding 30%. Similarly, the analyses of early brass at Oxford and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory found the lead content to be much greater than the 0.05% of the plate. Trace elements of tin, cadmium, iron, arsenic, antimony, nickel, magnesium, sulfur, calcium, silver, gold, and indium also corresponded to brass of the 20th century rather than of the 16th century. Furthermore, the copper content of the plate is unlike that of the Elizabethan era but similar to that which comes from the contemporary Great Lakes region. Other tests showed that the plate’s metal differed in several basic ways from early European and English brass. Nor could the plate be attributed to East Asia since sheet brass is not known to have been made there in the 16th century. An X-ray diffraction investigation by the Department of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering of the University of California led to the decision that the "plate was produced by modern rolling process rather than having been made by hammer shaping," the only means known in Drake’s time for creating such a large piece of flat brass. This study confirmed gamma-ray absorption tests showing that the uniform thickness of the plate did not exceed 2% whereas in the 16th century the variation would have been far greater. Two detailed binocular microscopic examinations of the plate by Dr. Cyril Stanley Smith, Professor Emeritus of MIT, and his scrutiny of enlarged color photographs revealed that the edge of the plate had none of the qualities of chisel cutting that one would expect in 16th century brass forging, but rather looked like a straight cut made by the modern device of a guillotine shear. The full texts of the investigations made between 1975 and 1979 were incorporated in two formal reports, The Plate of Brass Reexamined and A Supplement issued by The Bancroft Library. The assembled evidence turned out to be so negative that Professor Smith, after assessing all the information, stated that the data "made it virtually certain that the plate is not a piece of sixteen-century brass," and another leading investigator, Dr. R.E.M. Hedges of Oxford, declared, "I would regard it as quite unreasonable to continue to believe in the authenticity of the plate." Scientific studies have shown that what was thought to be a historical artifact is evidently a modern creation; yet what is left unanswered are the intriguing questions about who made the plate and why. James D. Hart, Director "Wimmer" Gold NuggetCurrently unavailable for viewing
This is the so-called "Wimmer" nugget, believed to be the piece of gold that started the California Gold Rush. Peter Wimmer was head of the construction crew erecting a lumber mill for John Sutter on the American River near the present town of Coloma. His wife, Elizabeth, did the cooking for the workmen. On January 24, 1848, James Marshall, Sutter's general foreman and contractor for the project, during a routine inspection with Wimmer, found the nugget in the tailrace of the mill. He sent it back to the cookhouse where Elizabeth Wimmer boiled it in a pot of lye soap (a folk recipe for testing gold). When she reported that it appeared genuine, Marshall gathered some other flakes and nuggets and took them back to Sutter's fort where he and Sutter tested them chemically, using information gained from an encyclopedia. Two months later, on March 15, 1848, the first notice of the discover appeared in The Californian of San Francisco. "GOLD MINE FOUND. In the newly made raceway of the Saw Mill recently erected by Captain Sutter, on the American Fork, gold has been found in considerable quantities. One person brought thirty dollars worth to New Helvetia, gathered there in a short time. California, no doubt, is rich in mineral wealth; great chances here for scientific capitalists. Gold has been found in almost every part of the country." Affidavits by both Elizabeth and Peter Wimmer accompany the nugget and attest to its being, indeed, the first gold found by Marshall. Although Marshall, a decade after the discovery, stated that he thought Elizabeth Wimmer had used the nugget to purchase some merchandise late in 1848, a re-examination by Professor Erwin Gudde in 1965 indicated that this nugget is, in all probability, the original "first discovery." |
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