“Atom Smashers” is a 1952 educational film about particle accelerators or ‘atom smashers’, their uses, and how they function. It is produced by the Encyclopaedia Britannica Films in collaboration with the Division of the Physical Sciences and the Institute of Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago. The film explains the different types of “atom smashers” and differences in how they operate – the viewer learns about the cyclotron, the betatron, and the linear accelerator. The function of the different types of particle accelerators is partially told through the narrative of a journalist, Frank Stevens, interviewing Professor Porter who works at a university that is experimenting with particle accelerators.

00:10 Encyclopaedia Britannica Films Logo 00:14 Movie title: ‘Atom Smashers’ 00:20 Production credits 00:40 Man working next to a cyclotron 00:55 View of a cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator 1:05 Frank Stevens, a writer, interviewing Professor Porter (a university professor) and taking notes 2:02 Diagram of an atom 2:07 Closeup of the central part of an atom, the nucleus 2:18 Frank Stevens standing next to Professor Porter with his writing pad out 3:01 Professor Porter standing in front of a poster of the periodic table of the elements 3:20 View of a cyclotron within the laboratory 3:26 Model of a cyclotron with individual parts labelled by signs 3:35 Model of the cyclotron with a pencil pointing out the labelled parts: upper magnet coil, steel vacuum tank and diffusion vacuum pumps, oscillator 4:05 View of huge concrete blocks around the cyclotron 4:20 Diagram of a metal tank situated between two magnets, illustrating how the tank works within the cyclotron 4:25 Illustration showing how hydrogen gas flows into the tank is transformed into protons 4:48 An illustration of the spiral path of the ions and how it ‘strikes’ its target and creates nuclear fragments or isotope 5:20 An illustration which ‘reviews’ how the cyclotron operates 5:38 An illustration of the operation of the ion spiral path and how when the target is a photographic plate, a photographic image is created 5:58 A physicist placing a photographic plate onto the vacuum chamber of the cyclotron 6:10 A physicist standing behind a protective door in the control room 6:18 A man in the control room adjusting buttons 6:32 Professor Porter and Frank Stevens sitting at his desk again while Stevens takes notes 7:14 Porter taking out a microscope, placing a photographic plate below and adjusting its focus for for Stevens to view it 7:30 The view from the microscope of the photographic plate showing the tracks of the proton 8:00 Porter pointing to a small cloud chamber on this desk 8:05 View of a sign reading ‘Particle Physics Cloud Chamber Laboratory’ 8:08 The drum like compartment of a cloud chamber 8:37 Two scientists observing photographs taken in the cloud chamber 8:41 An illuminated picture of a nuclear explosion 9:08 Workers operating on different particle accelerators 9:21 View of a cyclotron 9:26 Worker adjusting a dial at the base of a betatron 9:31 View of a linear accelerator 9:41 Model of a linear accelerator illustrating how the moving belt within it functions 9:52 Drawing of a horizontal model of a linear accelerator showing how the charges move within the linear accelerator and are converted into ions.

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