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Glaser took his doctorate at Caltech and in 1949 started teaching physics at the University of Michigan. Soon he got the first glimmerings of the seemingly wild idea that won him the Nobel Prize. After watching bubbles appear in freshly opened beer he suspected that they might be affected somehow by cosmic-ray particles striking through the gas-charged liquid. If this was so, the bubbles should be useful for detecting high-energy radiation.
His first attempt to prove this hypothesis was a failure. Glaser brought bottles of beer, soda water and ginger ale into his laboratory (beer was forbidden on campus, he now recalls) and heated them. He placed a radioactive source near a bottle; then he uncapped the bottle. The radiation had no observable effect on the bubbles that burst out of the bottle, but Glaser was not discouraged. Working with almost no funds or encouragement, he built his first successful bubble chamber in 1953. It was half an inch in diameter and was filled with ether. "Ether is cheap," explains Glaser, "and I could get it at the chemistry store without any red tape."
The principle behind the bubble chamber is that high-energy charged particles (electrons, protons, mesons, etc.) ionize materials that they pass through by knocking electrons off atoms. Glaser reasoned that these ions should repel one another, and that if they are formed in a liquid that is about to start boiling, they should show as lines of rapidly growing bubbles along the tracks of the particles. This is just what happens when a bubble chamber is made and manipulated in precisely the right way, which is not easy.
By 1955, Glaser's bubble chambers were working fine. Physicists, it now appeared, had been waiting for just such a piece of apparatus. Every serious physics laboratory now has at least one bubble chamber. The biggest one, at Berkeley, is 72 inches long, filled with liquid hydrogen, and cost $2,000,000.
Young Glaser, a bachelor, climbs low-resistance mountains ("I'm not the rope and piton type of climber"). He is still devoted to music, and may spend part of the $43,627 Nobel Prize on a really good viola. His boss, Chancellor Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel prizewinner himself, says, not wholly in jest, that he realized Glaser was highly eligible for a Nobel Prize and enticed him to Berkeley just in time to get some of the credit for the University of California.