SCIENCE

Tech Marvel: the Atom-Smashing Cyclotron

By Fox News
Published | Updated
Columbia's Cyclotron, in Living Color

In the world of technology, what's cutting-edge in the morning is often on the scrap-heap by the afternoon. But some machines are so revolutionary, so innovative -- so cool -- that even years after they've been largely outpaced or even replaced by other, more efficient or more powerful devices, they can still amaze. One such marvel is the cyclotron -- a huge, early "atom smasher" that led to, among other things, key breakthroughs in the study of subatomic particles and, in a sense, to the Atomic Age itself. Pictured: Columbia's cyclotron (Fritz Goro/TIME & LIFE Pictures)

Another view of the forging of Chicago University's giant magnet. (Fritz Goro./Time & Life Pictures)

A scientist holds a hammer at the end of a chain to demonstrate the cyclotron's magnetic power. "For the rest of the afternoon," LIFE wrote of the fun and games at the christening party, "science stood still. Not until day's end were the scientists, thoroughly exhausted, willing to return once more to their serious occupation of tearing atoms apart." (Fritz Goro./Time & Life Pictures)

Dr. Eugene Gardner, 35, and Brazilian-born Dr. C.M.G. Lattes, 23, in the control room of UC-Berkeley's cyclotron, 1948. In March of that year, TIME magazine reported: "The University of California admitted last week (after too many garbled rumors in the press) that it had created the first man-made meson ... with its 4,000-ton cyclotron. [Mesons are unstable, short-lived subatomic particles that last for, perhaps, a few hundred-millionths of a second.] The news caused a sizable flurry throughout the world of physics -- for mesons are closely connected with the unknown force that holds matter together." In 1950, the British physicist Cecil Powell won the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method." (Nat Farbman/Time & Life Pictures)

A chain of nails held together by the Columbia cyclotron's magnet on the day of its christening. (Fritz Goro./Time & Life Pictures)

"After the christening," LIFE reported, "the magnet was turned on and, like kids exploring the possibilities of a new toy, physicists swarmed around to see how hard it could pull ..." Pictured: researcher wrestles with a sheet of metal caught in the magnet's grip. (Fritz Goro/Time & Life Pictures)

Students gather around the control board of the cyclotron at the Royal Society Mond Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1938. "Fundamentally," LIFE wrote of the early machines, "the cyclotron is nothing but a radio transmitter and a magnet. The transmitter, which generates oscillating electrical power, increases the speed of particles, usually ions of heavy hydrogen, in its field by giving them intermittent electrical pushes, as a boy hits a hoop to make it roll faster. The magnet holds them in a flat spiral path as they travel outward until they hit the target." (George W. Hales)