How Particle Accelerators Hit The Big Time

Particle accelerators may have a unique place in the history of scientific apparatus due to the fact researchers were using them to make important discoveries before they knew what they were or how they worked.

Perhaps the first, albeit primitive, man-made particle accelerator is the cathode ray tube , something in almost every home in the western world as part of the television. 

In 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen used a cathode ray tube, invented in the late 19th century but relegated to scientific curiosity, to discover X-rays.

The discovery would scoop Röntgen the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901, but the honor of discovering what was happening with the cathode ray tube he used would go to Joseph John Thompson. 

In 1897, Thompson, a physicist from Manchester, UK,  discovered the electron, originally naming them corpuscles, in an attempt to solve the mystery of cathode rays. Thomspon found that cathode rays were actually small negatively charged particles being accelerated through the tube by electromagnets. In a TV or monitor that uses a cathode ray tube, those electrons are smashed into phosphor molecules, creating a lighted spot on the screen.

Further research would reveal electrons to be part of the atom, with Thompson initially suggesting a “plum-pudding model” with electrons scattered randomly through the atom-like negatively-charged fruit in the positively-charged pudding. 

This model would be succeeded by models of the atom that see a particle with an equal but positive charge and a much greater mass at the center of an atom — the proton. Later models proposed the electron buzzing around the proton and its fellow nucleus-dweller,  the neutral particle the neutron, discovered later at set energy levels. 

The existence of these charged particles opened up the possibility of intentionally accelerating them to relativistic speeds using electromagnets. 

This principle was put into with early electrostatic accelerators leading to perhaps the most famous example of such technology, the Van de Graaff generator.