Early milestones in the evolution of accelerators

Abstract

About 80 years ago Rutherford [1] expressed the hope that particles could be accelerated to energies exceeding those occurring in radioactivity, enabling the study of nuclei and their constituents. Physicists and engineers have more than met this challenge, and today the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN, Geneva is about to accelerate protons to 7 trillion (7 × 1012) eV. Here we describe some of the crucial steps that have gotten us there.