The world’s first industrial atom smasher was built in Forest Hills in 1937 by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Standing four stories high, the van de Graaff particle accelerator created nuclear reactions by blasting target atoms with high-energy particles that accelerated down a vacuum tube at 100 million miles per hour to a pressure vessel 47 feet below. The discovery of the photo-fission of uranium was spurred by research done at this facility in the 1940s.
