Synchrotron radiation was initially sapping energy from
circulating electron beams and upsetting calculations.
Fortunately physicists learned that the fan of synchrotron
radiation "waste" from high energy electron rings could be used
to probe the structure of a wide range There are many views on
how synchrotrons and synchrotron light developed. Below, I have
written one of the views. On April 24, 1947, Herb Pollock,
Robert Langmuir, Frank Elder, and Anatole Gurewitsch saw a gleam
of bluish-white light emerging from the transparent vacuum tube
of their new 70MeV electron synchrotron at General Electric's
Research Laboratory, Schenectady, New York: Synchrotron
radiation had been seen. Here is a picture of the first
synchrotron radiation seen. The first seen synchrotron radiation
is indicated by arrow in the picture on the left. (The first
seen But the idea of synchrotron light goes as far back as the
19th century. A French physicist Alfred Lienard of the Ecole des
Mines in Paris described the concept of retarde