Westinghouse Atom Smasher: A Five-Story Pear of Pure Science
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Standing nearby is one of the most peculiar industrial monuments in Pennsylvania: a five-story pear-shaped structure made of concrete and steel, built in nineteen thirty-seven. It is the world's first industrial Van de Graaff generator, built by the Westinghouse Research Laboratories as an early experiment in particle acceleration and atomic energy.
The machine worked by generating enormous static electric charges and using them to accelerate subatomic particles, a technique that helped researchers probe the structure of the atom. At Westinghouse, it served nuclear research aimed at practical uses of nuclear energy. The company used the knowledge gained here to establish American leadership in nuclear power generation after World War Two. It was used in nineteen forty to discover photofission, the splitting of uranium and thorium nuclei, in the patient, incremental way that real science works.
