On October 17, 1973, the Elmhurst College Department of Physics turned on its Cockroft-Walton accelerator for the first time. This represents a significant addition to the facilities of the college as well as the remarkable achievement of a small group of students.

The accelerator has had a very long and distinguished career. It was first built begining in 1934 by Dr. Samuel King Allison of the University of Chicago, which was only six years after the invention of the particle accelerator by J.D. Cockroft and E.T.S. Walton. Dr. Allison started with a simple voltage doubler of the Cockroft-Walton type and a crude RF oscillator ion source. In 1942 another high voltage stage, a better flight tube, and a new ion source were added to the Machine. During the late 1940's and early 1950's two of the graduate students to work on the accelerator were C.N. Yang and T.D. Lee, who later went on to win the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics for their theoretical work on parity violation. During the year 1952 the accelerator underwent a major rebuilding. A third high voltage stage was added to the circuit, which increased the theoretical maximum acceleration voltage to 750,000 volts. The ion source was also improved. Also during the 1950's, the accelerator began to be called the "Kevatron." This was a joke since at the time most physicists were off building the more powerful Mevatrons and Bevatrons. The accelerator remained in this form until 1967 until the University of Chicago decided to dispose of it two years after Dr. Allison's death.

The Kevatron's journey to Elmhurst College began with a chance encounter between George Koch, an Elmhurst student, and Mr. John Erwood, a University of Chicago research associate, at a science fair at the Museum of Science and Industry. Mr. Erwood had spent many years working with the Kevatron. According to Mr. Erwood, they were chatting about physics and accelerators when the student asked if John would give the Elmhurst physics department any advice in building an accelerator. John's response was, "I'll do better than that; I'll give you an accelerator!"

Dr. Theodore B. Holliday, then chairman of the physics department at Elmhurst then completed negotiations with the University of Chicago for the accelerator and with Elmhurst College for a place to house it.

The accelerator arrived in pieces in 55-gallon drums. These were stored outdoors under old lumber sheds for two years while a turn-of-the-century warehouse on the college campus was remodeled using a National Science Foundation grant obtained for the purpose by Dr. Holliday. The actual construction of the accelerator began in the summer of 1968 by C.T. Morris. He set up the glass insulator stacks and some of the capacitor stacks for the accelerator. After he graduated, Albert D. Thomas and Daniel Rubino took over. They completed the physical construction of the machine and started on the wiring for the controls console and the experiments. They also put together the vacuum systems and wired up part of the ion source. At this point Anthony Koprowski and James T. Volk took over, They rechecked the electrical work and finished the vacuum systems. All of the work to this point was greatly aided with the knowledgable help and advice of John Erwood. On Oct. 17, 1973 John Erwood said, "What the hell, let's turn it on!" And they did. The result was a proton beam at 230KeV on the first try. The great eent was celebrated with a bottle of Chianti in the tradition of hte comisioning of the first nuclear reactor by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago in 1930. The signed bottle still hangs in the Accelerator Laboratory.

Once the celebrating was over, the shakedown testing began. The first major problems appeared in January 1974 when the filament in one of the vacuum tube diodes burned out. These vacuum tubes (kentrons) are about then three feet long and date from the 1950's. After the first burn out, some of the others were also found to be gassious and unusable. There were no spares. Efforts to repair the broken tubes proved unsuccessful. When efforts to locate similar vacuum diodes also proved unsucessful, it was decided to convert to solid state diodes. Universal Voltronics in New York took the contract for the six diodes that were needed. These arrived in the late fall of 1974 along with the proper current limiting resistors. Unfortunately, the high electrical resistance in the diodes limited the maximum accelerator voltage to 300 kilovolts. This problem was solved by replacing the first solid state diode with one of the two remaining kentron tubes and by replacing the new resistors with the old, smaller originals.

The school year of 1974-1975 was a very good one for the Kevatron. Three experiments were set up. One was a Rutherford scattering experiment, one was a radiation-damage experiment (protons on MgO), and one was a lithium beam-foil spectroscopy experiment. The 1954-vintage lithium ion source was dusted off and rebuilt by Tony Koprowski and Russ Mueller. In order to test the ion source, they rebuilt the Kevatrette, a small 40 kilovolt accelerato. The month of May 1975 was largely spent in attempting to increase the maximum voltage of the accelerator. Although 500 kilovolts was briefly achieved, the geometry of hte Kevatron and the building limit the particle maximum to 350 kilovolts.

Tony and Jim graduated in 1975. The next generation of students consisted of Russ Mueller, Nadia Sawula, and Rusty Malchow. They continued to improve the lithium ion source. The also began the conversion of the Rutherford scattering experiment to a lithium radiation damage experiment. Nadia continued to work on her beam-foil spectroscopy experiment until she graduated in ht spring of 1976. In the fall of 1976, the Elmhurst College physics department consisted of Dr. William H. Sawyer (dept. chairman) and Dr. Earl C. Swallow, who was new that year. The physics class of 1980 was the biggest ever seen until that time. The accelerator team was also augmented by a very talented high school student named Frank Hansen and by the return of Rusty Malchow, who had dropped out temporarily in 1975. The radiation damage experiment was making significant progress and was nearly ready for publication. Frank, Sandy Shimkus, and Pam Eder rebuilt the Kevatrette to accomodate the RF ion source for use in the radiation damage experiment. The project won Frank a place in the top forty winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.

1980 was a rather grim year for the Kevatron. The large class of 1980 (including Rusty Malchow, who had worked with Volk and Koprowski in 1974) graduated. Dr. Sawyer received and accepted a very lucrative offer to join the Zeiss Corporation in New York. Frank Hansen had had graduated high school in 1979 and decided not to enroll at Elmhurst College. Dr. Swallow was buisly occupied with high energy physics experiments at Argonne and had not been heavily involved with the Kevatron up to this point. And the large class of 1980 had failed to impart their knowledge of the accelerator to the class of 1981, 1982, and 1983. Thus, everyone who knew anything about the accelerator was gone.

Dr. Sawyer was replaced by Dr. James Morrison. Dr. Morrison made a few attempts to work on the accelerator, but he had difficulty in knowing where to begin. Some of the students set up a short-lived lounge in the Accelerator Lab. Eventually they all lost interest in the whole project. The Kevatron was abandoned for the next three years.

Russ Mueller returned to the Accelerator Lab in the fall of 1983. The laboratory was in atrocious condition. Hannah Cranor (now Mrs. James T. Volk) and I began by throwing out grabage, shoveling the dirt off of the floor, and by making lists of repairs for the College Physical Plant. We were soon joine by Donna Walters, an Elmhurst physics/math/computer science major. Because Hannah and Mueller both had full-time jobs at Fermilab, they were only able to work on weekends. It took several months of weekends to restore the building to a habitable condition. Then the college decided to move the stored physics department equipment in the building next door to the Accelerator Lab. Thus we spent many more months finding places for the piles of equipment that appeared each weekend. Week after week, the condition of the lab and the accelerator improved. They were joined in November of that year by Ken Hartmen, a chemistry major with a decided interest in all things electrical. The following November they were joined by two high school students: Cons Gattuso and John Koustak. Hannah began taking physics courses at Elmhurst and graduated in May, 1985. In September 1985, Cons became an official freshman Elmhurst College physics major.

Week by week, they kept going. On December 31, 1985, they turned on the Kevatron and promptly achieved 300,000 volts. The ion source was on, but the beam was of too low an intensity to be detected. All that work finally paid off. The Kevatron lives again!