In 1947, Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. and Robert Curtis Retherford dissociated hydrogen in a tungsten oven, crossed its atomic jet with electrons for collisional excitation, and detected surviving $2S$ atoms by electron ejection from metal. An electrometer and galvanometer read the current. They interrupted fixed-frequency microwaves while sweeping the static magnetic field; a flip coil calibrated the field. Their Zeeman splitting comparison placed $2S_{1/2}$ about $1000$ $\mathrm{MHz}$ above $2P_{1/2}$; the plotted $1000$ $\mathrm{MHz}$ displacement was explicitly not a best fit.^[ref]

The 1955 lecture's apparatus cross-section identifies movable slits, an electron bombarder, a radiofrequency transmission line with beam slots, a d.c. quenching electrode, metal target, electron collector, and magnet poles. A $2S\to 2P$ transition followed by rapid spontaneous emission leaves a ground-state atom unable to eject detector electrons. The scan holds radiofrequency and amplitude fixed. Natural linewidth and unresolved hyperfine structure broaden resonances, whose analysis yields zero-field separations.^[ref]

Static electric field quenching supplied a control. The 1947 report identifies natural linewidth, hyperfine structure, excessive microwave intensity, and field inhomogeneity as width contributions, and flags imperfect magnetic calibration. It does not specify an absolute microwave-frequency calibration procedure.^[ref]

The surname is Robert Curtis Retherford's: “Retherford” and “Rutherford” name different people. The historical Lamb-Retherford experiment should retain the former spelling.^[ref]

The zero-field energy levels here are averaged over hyperfine structure; $h$ is the Planck constant. Electron self-energy and vacuum polarization produce radiative corrections. Self-energy describes the bound electron's radiative interaction with its own electromagnetic field. Precision predictions also include nuclear recoil and proton charge radius effects; assigning recoil terms to the reference or Lamb shift is convention-dependent. A finite proton charge radius changes binding independently of radiative effects.^[ref]

A vacuum-electric field “jiggling” picture motivates one contribution, not every hydrogen atom energy correction.