Fermilab - History

History

Weston, Illinois was a community next to Batavia voted out of existence by its village board in 1966 to provide a site for Fermilab.

The laboratory was founded in 1967 as the National Accelerator Laboratory; it was renamed in honor of Enrico Fermi in 1974. The lab's first director was Robert Rathbun Wilson. Many of the unique sculptures on the site are of his creation. He is attributed as being responsible for it being finished ahead of time and under budget. The high rise laboratory building located on the site, the unique shape of which has become the symbol for Fermilab, is named in his honor, and is the center of activity on the campus.

After Wilson stepped down in 1978 to protest the lack of funding for the lab, Leon M. Lederman took on the job. It was under his guidance that the original accelerator was replaced with the Tevatron accelerator, an accelerator capable of colliding proton and an antiproton at a combined energy of 1.96 TeV. Lederman stepped down in 1989 and remains Director Emeritus. The on-site science education center was named in his honor.

From 1989 to 1999, the lab was run by John Peoples. From July 1, 1999, until June 30, 2005, the lab was run by Michael S. Witherell. On November 19, 2004 Piermaria Oddone, formerly of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, was announced as Fermilab's newest director. Oddone began his term as director July 1, 2005.

Fermilab was one of the potential sites for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was eventually built at the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland and is also a potential site for the proposed International Linear Collider.

Fermilab continues to participate in the work in the LHC including serving as a Tier 1 site in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.