The date was 7 August 1968; the place, an underground bunker inside a hill near Lake Kegonsa in southern Wisconsin. The environment was hardly better than a cavern: dimly lit, noisy, and cluttered with instrumentation—old equipment, recycled war items, and a few new pieces. The 240-MeV electron storage ring known as Tantalus was only 3 meters wide and rather ugly, but it worked. Through a glass window, one could even watch the visible synchrotron light emitted by the circulating electrons. The beam current in the ring was quite small, about 1 mA, and rapidly decreasing. That morning, Ulrich Gerhardt, a German postdoctoral fellow from the group led by University of Chicago faculty member Helmut Fritzsche, prepared to take absorption and reflection spectra of cadmium sulfide in the wavelength range from 1100 to 2700 Å.
At 10:40am, he obtained the first data set and inaugurated a new era in experimental science....
