William Leonard Laurence was Lithuanian-born American journalist. He began his career as a journalist in 1926 at "The New York World". In 1930 he began working at "The New York Times".
Background
William Leonard Laurence was born Leid Siew, on March 7, 1888 in the village of Salantai, Lithuania, the son of Lipman Siew and Sarah Preuss. His father, a devout orthodox Jew, devoted most of his time to religious studies, so it generally fell to his mother to run the family's small shop, which dealt mostly in medicines.
Education
Laurence's early education consisted mainly of instruction in Hebrew, German, and Russian from a local tutor. Following his bar mitzvah at age thirteen, he enrolled in a school of Talmudic study. By then, however, he had begun to read avidly in science, literature, and philosophy; the intellectual perspectives derived from that reading placed him sharply at odds with the school's religious teachings. As a result, his teachers soon viewed him as a troublemaker, and he was dismissed from the school. Later he attended Harvard University (1908-1911; 1914-1915). School refused him a degree because he had failed to complete certain course requirements, and although he received a cum laude in philosophy, he left Harvard in 1915 without officially graduating. Then he studied at the University of Besançon (1919) and Harvard Law School (1921). He received his LL. B. from the Boston University School of Law in 1925.
Career
After schooling, Laurence moved to the city of Libau (Liepaja), Latvia, where he earned his living as a Hebrew tutor. Here his sympathy for radical political ideas drew him to local dissidents, and in 1905 he participated in a revolt against Latvia's Russian rulers. The rebellion was ultimately crushed, and Laurence found himself faced with the threat of arrest. After escaping to Germany concealed in a barrel, he immigrated to the United States.
He first worked briefly at a textile factory in Brooklyn, New York, then in 1906 moved to Boston, where he took a job delivering flowers. Two years later, having saved enough money for tuition, he entered Harvard. In 1913 he became an American citizen. During his final undergraduate days, Laurence did special tutoring in Greek philosophy and, in the process, showed himself to be a master in remedial instruction. Soon thereafter, as an employee of the Roxbury School, he began tutoring Harvard students on a regular basis.
Following service in the United States Army during World War I, he returned to Boston in 1919 and opened his own tutoring establishment, the Mt. Auburn Tutoring School. Laurence closed his school in 1921. In 1926, after trying his hand at writing plays, he took a job as a general reporter for the New York World. There, Laurence found his true calling. When assigned to cover a lecture by James MacKaye challenging Einstein's theory of relativity, he produced a story that demonstrated his rare gift for reducing modern scientific theory to easily comprehended terms that led him eventually to be dubbed the "Boswell" of modern American science. Largely on the strength of that story the New York Times hired him as its full-time science reporter in 1930.
Laurence soon emerged as a leader in his new journalistic specialty. In 1934 he helped to found the National Association of Science Writers.
Laurence was more than just a good chronicler of modern scientific progress. Thanks to his remarkable ability to envision the practical applications of a given development, he was also one of its catalysts, and on a number of occasions his reportage led to noteworthy advances in science. It was an article of his, for example, that prompted the Squibb Company to investigate further the medicinal uses of sulfadiazine. In another piece, he reported Vladimir Zworykin's thoughts on a supermicroscope for use in television. In so doing, he hastened the development of television by making Zworykin's superiors at Radio Corporation of America finally realize the value of a concept that they had ignored when Zworykin first raised it.
Perhaps Laurence's most noteworthy contribution to science came in 1949, when in the course of reporting on the pain-relieving potentials of manufactured cortisone, he tracked down a little-known African plant whose seed could be used as a base for that drug. No journalist had a quicker or deeper grasp of modern physics than Laurence. In 1940, taking his cue from a brief note in a science journal on efforts to isolate an isotope of uranium known as U-235, he produced the first lengthy discussion in the popular press about atomic energy and its enormous energy-generating powers.
In the final months of World War II, this prescient piece of reporting led to Laurence's recruitment into the United States Army's top-secret Manhattan Project, charged with developing the atomic bomb. There he was assigned to draft the press releases that were to go out when the weapon finally became an actuality. In the process he observed most phases of the enterprise, including the detonation of an atomic bomb over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, while he flew on an instrument plane.
On returning to the Times shortly thereafter, he produced a series of articles on the history of this weapon and its wartime uses. Known afterward as "Atomic Bill, " Laurence later wrote several books on atomic energy, among them Dawn Over Zero (1946) and Men and Atoms (1959). In 1956 he became science editor for the Times, a position that he held until his retirement in 1964. In his final years he served as a science consultant to the New York World's Fair and to the National Foundation-March of Dimes. He died in Majorca, Spain.
In 1940 the American Institute of New York City awarded him a fellowship, citing his "pre-eminent record of reporting brilliantly the achievements of science and technology. "
Connections
Laurence married Florence Davidow on December 19, 1931. They had no children.