Image: Tuve & Breit Tesla coil particle accelerator 1928

Description: A 5 MV Tesla coil built by pioneering accelerator physicists Merle Tuve and Gregory Breit at the Carnegie Institution in 1928 for use as an early particle accelerator. It consists of a cylindrical secondary coil one meter long of 800 turns of fine wire on a pyrex tube, with spherical metal corona caps attached to each end, with a spiral primary of 5 turns of thick wire around the center. The pyrex secondary coil form was evacuated and used as the acceleration tube within which the electrons were accelerated. It was operated immersed in a tank of insulating oil pressurized to 500 psi to prevent air breakdown to reach high voltages. The coil reached voltages of 5.2 MV but did not work well as a particle accelerator because the high frequency AC voltage left only a small interval of time at the peak of each cycle to accelerate the particles.
Title: Tuve & Breit Tesla coil particle accelerator 1928
Credit: Retrieved April 22, 2015 from Alden P. Armagnac, "A five-million-volt gun built to smash atoms" in Popular Science magazine, Popular Science Publishing Co., New York, Vol. 114, No. 1, January 1929, p. 23 on Google Books
Author: Alden P. Armagnac
Permission: This 1929 issue of Popular Science magazine would have the copyright renewed in 1957. Online page scans of the Catalog of Copyright Entries, published by the US Copyright Office can be found here. Search of the Renewals for Periodicals for 1956, 1957, and 1958 show no renewal entries for Popular Science. Therefore the copyright was not renewed and it is in the public domain.
Usage Terms: Public domain
License: Public domain
Attribution Required?: No