(Photo of technician working with Long Tank electrostatic accelerator at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, courtesy of Jay Davis.)
History
The Garage Physics lab in B613 Sterling Hall was home to the development of the electrostatic accelerator by Prof. Raymond George Herb (1908-1996) in the 1930's. The Long Tank accelerator developed by Herb was transported to Los Alamos during the Manhattan project for use in characterizing nuclear cross sections. Herb returned to Wisconsin after the war and grew the UW-Madison nuclear physics group and later National Electrostatics Corporation in Middleton, WI.
While serving as Dept. of Physics Board of Visitors chair, Jay Davis kindly supplied the photograph above he describes as follows: "Los Alamos Archives has found and cleaned up a picture of the Long Tank for us. This required lots of retouching and scratch removal. Here is probably a Navy Technician running the accelerator, standing on a stool, looking through a port into the pressure vessel, encased in wire mess that looks bad, likely heedless of the radiation levels. Your students should know what the past was like. There of course was a war on. Note that everyone seemed to weigh about 60 kilos then."
References
Los Alamos History http://www.mphpa.org/classic/HISTORY/H-06c16.htm
A biography of Ray Herb by Henry Heinz Barshall at the National Academy of Science.