Physicists who uncovered the first particle accelerator were honored with a Nobel Prize 75 years ago – their work shaped physics, medicine and even art research

In the early 1930s, physicists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, working under Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, built the first machine to deliberately accelerate particles, producing up to 800,000 volts to smash protons into lithium nuclei and split them into alpha particles. The pair won the Nobel Prize in 1951 for proving that machines, not just radioactive decay, could probe and transform the atomic nucleus.

That tabletop device seeded a technology now spanning room-sized medical accelerators to CERN's 17-mile Large Hadron Collider, where protons circle the Earth more than seven times a second. Over 1,500 accelerators today are used in cancer diagnosis and treatment, and many hospitals keep their own on-site to produce short-lived radioactive isotopes before they decay.

The technology has also wandered into art and archaeology, with the Louvre running the world's only accelerator dedicated solely to cultural heritage work since 1988, and into aerospace, where accelerator-based research helps engineers test satellite electronics against cosmic-ray damage.

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