An alumnus of the class of 1957 writes, "Some time in the late 1950s, I was able to make a little extra spending money by serving as an operator at the MIT Synchrotron Lab. As a course VII graduate, I have only a general idea of the construction and purpose of the Synchrotron. However, in this equipment a beam of electrons is made to circle at incredible speeds within an evacuated "donut" made-I think--if some ceramic material. I don't know the diameter of the donut, but the whole thing was contained in a very large room walled off with lead bricks. It was located in a temporary building where building 12 is now. Its dimensions, of course, have now been dwarfed by the huge underground electron accelerators at Argonne Labs and in Europe.

"The beam was kept accelerating in its circular path by huge electromagnets spaced around the "donut." Each magnet would be energized, in turn, at the correct time to keep the beam on track. Hence the term "Synchrotron." Occasionally, the beam would strike a "target" inside the donut and knock loose various subatomic particles. This happening was called an "event." A counter on the control console tabulated the number of events in numbers called "mice." Events over a certain magnitude, called "ratz," were tabulated in a separate counter.

"The Synchrotron was kept running continuously by shifts of operators whose job was to maximize the beam intensity as indicated on a panel meter. There were a dozen or two controls to be manipulated to this end--many marked with trigonometric functions whose meaning was only vaguely clear to us operators. Our job was simply to make the rounds of the controls over and over again to keep the intensity maximized.

"Hovering over the operation at various times was the staff member whose experiment was being run--often a graduate student who needed the results for his thesis. An operator who tried to use the time to study or read a magazine was subjected to withering glares, and sometimes blacklisted if he didn't get the message.

"Relieving the operator's boredom during the long, dull shifts was the necessity of "icing the traps" of the several vacuum pumps that kept the donut evacuated. Then things got relatively exciting. First the beam was shut down. Then access to the experiment room was gained by turning a composite lock with a group of keys obtained by locking out various dangerous areas.

"Now the operator visited the Dewar Flask at each trap, topping it off with a mixture of liquid nitrogen (don't get your finger in it or it'll fall off" we were warned) and dry ice crushed from big blocks using a wooden mallet. Then the room was locked up again, the lockout keys returned, and the Synchrotron could be re-started.

"The first step in re-starting was to slowly raise the voltage of a huge power supply near the operator's console by activating a motorized Variac with a momentary contact switch on the control panel. When the voltage was high enough, a bank of the largest capacitors I have ever seen became changed enough to fire into the magnets with an explosive report. This would be followed by a series of other reports, soon settling down to the rhythm that would keep the electron beam circling the donut.

"Finally, after pressing of a button that activated an incredibly loud and raucous warning horn, the operator could turn on the beam and settle down to another quiet four hours of maximizing controls.

"I apologize in advance for any misconceptions that I might have incorporated into this little story--and stand ready to be corrected and/or amplified by physicists or physics students of the time."