Leon Lederman was at Columbia University when he called for a "truly national accelerator."
Fifty years ago Thursday, a few people opened a rented office in Oak Brook.
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It would have to do for a
while, until they could clear out the people inhabiting the land where
their big project was to be built.
But it was still a banner day: Construction of the National Accelerator Laboratory was really going to happen.
Today, scientists,
engineers and support workers mark the birthday of the lab -- later
named after famed physicist Enrico Fermi -- by looking forward to doing
science for years to come, despite some perpetual funding challenges.
"We have developed some ambitious plans for the future. ... Our hopes are undimmed," said Tim Meyer, Fermilab's chief operating officer.
No more Weston
Nearby residents may
take for granted the 6,800 acres of almost all open space west of
Warrenville, north of Aurora and east of Batavia. Lab buildings, with
the exception of Wilson Hall, are low-slung affairs. The site features
restored prairie. There's even a herd of bison.
But if it weren't for the lab, the view might have been much different.
Until 1959, the area was
farmland. Then, a real estate developer began to build the village of
Weston, envisioned as a town of at least 50,000 people, complete with
hospitals, shopping and an airport, according to "Poliscide: Big
Government, Big Science, Lilliputian Politics," a 1976 book on
Fermilab's roots. About 500 people lived in Weston.
Seven years earlier,
though, a group called the Midwestern Universities Research Association
began trying to get a particle accelerator built in the Midwest.
Atom-smashing accelerators were in New York and California, and
physicists worldwide were racing to build more powerful ones. Some
scientists had argued that the ones at Brookhaven in New York and the
University of California at Berkeley were too parochial, keeping
scientists from other universities from using them to do experiments.
Fermilab's namesake, Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, created the first nuclear reactor.
Leon Lederman, then at
Columbia University, called for the creation of a truly national
laboratory that would let scientists from many universities use it for
their work.
Designs were bandied
about, and cases were made to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which
oversaw federal laboratories. More than 200 sites, in 46 states, were
suggested.
By March 1966, Illinois was one of six states in the running. All had to agree to supply the land for the project.
One potential site, South Barrington, was removed after residents protested.
Fermi for fair housing
The Main Ring, shown in 1981.
- Courtesy of Fermilab
Wheeling and dealing
occurred, fueled by distaste for what the Weston developer envisioned, a
desire for the thousands of construction jobs it could mean, and the
prestige of having a premier research institution in the Chicago area,
where the first atom was split. There was even a civil-rights angle: the
Rev. Martin Luther King's Chicago Freedom group staged a tent-in in
Warrenville, suggesting the lab should not be built in a state that
hadn't adopted open-housing laws.
There was speculation
that Illinois got it in an exchange for political favors between
Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen and Democratic President Lyndon Johnson,
according to Fermilab archives. The talk was Johnson would push for
Illinois, in exchange for Dirksen's support of Johnson's civil-rights
agenda, including voting for the national fair-housing law.
And in December 1966, Illinois won the prize.
The state bought Weston.
In 1968, those Oak Brook offices moved into homes where families had
once lived, and ground was broken for construction.
Fermilab's first director, Robert Wilson, is shown at a 1969 groundbreaking ceremony for the research lab's Main Ring.
- Courtesy of Fermilab
In March 1971, lab
director Robert Rathbun Wilson began lobbying for construction of the
Tevatron accelerator, to make particles move even faster and collisions
more powerful; in March 1972, the first experiment began with beams shot
through the Main Ring. The 16-story headquarters rose in 1973.
In 1979, construction of the Tevatron in the Main Ring began, with Lederman now as lab director.
And in 1983, the
Tevatron became the most powerful accelerator in the world, remaining
there until the Large Hadron Collider superseded it in 2011.
These are the original magnets in the Main Ring, when it was being built in 1970.
- Courtesy of Fermilab
In 1995, it was
announced the laboratory had found the top quark, the most massive of
all observed elementary particles. And in 2012, data produced by the
Tevatron at Fermilab helped show evidence of the Higgs boson, nicknamed
the "God particle."
But that's the past. Though it's certainly not irrelevant.
Fermilab's 50th birthday plays an important role.
"It's not just nostalgia," Meyer said. "What can we learn from the past, and how does that help us over the next 50 years?"
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