Adventures with Synchrotron Radiation at Harvard

In the late 1950s, a 6 GeV electron synchrotron (the CEA) was being built at Harvard/MIT. Ed Purcell, who generally trafficked in volts (or maybe kilovolts), but never gigavolts, was thinking about what one could do with all that synchrotron radiation that otherwise would uselessly warm up the walls of the beamline (I remember well his student Roger Tsien's nice drawing of radiation from kinks in the outgoing E-field lines of an electron in relativistic circular motion; see Figure 1).