Building Magnets at Brookhaven National Laboratory: A Condensed Account

The development of superconducting wire and cable in the late twentieth century enabled high-field magnets and thus much higher beam-collision energies in accelerators. These higher collision energies have allowed experimentalists to probe further into the structure of matter at the most fundamental, subatomic level. The behavior of the early universe, where these high energies prevailed, and its evolution over time are the realm their experiments seek to investigate. The subject has aroused the curiosity of the public as well as scientists and has facilitated the support needed to build and operate such expensive machines and experiments. The path forward has not been easy, however. Success in most projects has been mixed with failure, progress with ineptitude. The building of high energy accelerators is mostly a story of capable people doing their best to develop new and unusual technology toward some defined goal, facing both success and failure along the way. It is also a story of administrative imperatives that had unpredictable effects on a project’s success, depending mostly on the people in the administrative roles and the decisions that they made.